Mesa Developers Discuss Branching Off Old Drivers, Including R300g & i915

[RussianNeuroMancer]

I agree that branching off NV30 few years ago could save these cards from breakage, I still have couple of laptops with this GPU and for example only mode I can get KWin working is GLES2. However, I disagree with dungeon's ideas about R600g. New PCs with Richland by DEXP was still sold year ago at local store (and maybe still sold today) and HP sold laptops with some VLIW iGPU / dGPU just couple of years ago at least in EMEA. Since GL4+ support is still incomplete, at least driver should be on the level of what hardware is capable of, then branching off is Ok, but as I see developers not even talking about R300 branching, let alone R600g.

I using laptop with 6620G+6650M myself, I still not see why I should change it to anything else until I deal with my Steam backlog.

[dungeon]

But mesa drivers are always incomplete, if you look for Compatibility Profile support or about some of many of vendor extensions (both AMD's and particulary nVidia's) these are not there for any drivers

Beside some specific extensions for implementation and couple more here and there specific to vendor, Mesa only supports subset of extensions minimum to pass particular GL version on particular hardware, these drivers will actually never do exactly what blob drivers do, they trying to cover most usecases but not everything . With that in mind there are always reason for someone to complain that something is missing and good cover to say how Mesa should never drop anything

5 years ago with Mesa v8 dropped all drivers that don't or can't support DRI2. So why now they can't say anything that can't run DRI3, Gnome and Wayland is dropped and anything that can't do Vulkan goes to branch off

You see they can always found some reasons if people like to hear reasons even without reasons And that just to cover necessity to drop something after a while

[ElectricPrism]

In the pursuit of simplification we can take it too far sometimes. Eg: Apple displaying every file in the entire filesystem in 1 folder.

Or making the System Settings Application simplified having less areas to change things but forcing the overflow settings into a second app like Gnome Tweak, etc...

I'm just curious at what point developer time is saved, because maintaining 2 things seems like it could get hairy fast.

If it was me I might break it up into generations, Mesa Generation 1, Mesa Gen 2, etc... and every 5 or 10 years shed some weight.

Side note: I don't know the code but I often wonder why more developers don't Interface old code with a function API (The old driver asks for eg: MESA API v9.0 and then routes to the current function calls.)

[dungeon]

Developer time might be saved the best if AMD opensource their Vulkan to be use off of Mesa, which might make Mesa somewhat deprecated I think RadV is developed just because of that intention, Mesa must produce enough steam and heat around to not look like so deprecated

Do people know that Vulkan can be used entirely separate, with X just write full 2D ddx driver and you don't need neither GL nor Mesa for anything and current one is preaty much feature complete enough That is as simple as possible, no cruft, no old, no breakages, no bloat, with probably ten times less developers

[My8th]

How does one calculate the cost of not dropping unmaintained code?

[dungeon]

How does one calculate the cost of not dropping unmaintained code?

I just mentioned, one full featured ddx and one Vulkan driver is enough to be entirely modern GL is not needed at all if you wanna be modern. Everythng else is nearly already there, so not much investments needed.

Tell me a product like that and i would buy it tommorow, yes something without GL but with VK instead i would buy immidiately Just DDX and VK - nothing else and i am all yours ready to look only at future

Other than that whole indutry supports old cruft and that is most expensive.

[Tomin]

Tell me a product like that and i would buy it tommorow, yes something without GL but with VK instead i would buy immidiately Just DDX and VK - nothing else and i am all yours ready to look only at future

If you want to be modern, what do you need DDX for? (There is no DDX driver on Wayland.)

[dungeon]

If you want to be modern, what do you need DDX for? (There is no DDX driver on Wayland.)

To avoid Wayland also, all of GL; that GL cruft, bloat, composition, breakages, compatability, and all other possible bullshits

GL is absolutely not needed for anything modern, other than vendors wanna push these as their valuable legacy. With X, full featured traditional DDX (which does not require GL of course) and Vulkan driver i am all fine

Again give that to me and i will buy it, that is so simple to do but of course they don't want to do that regadless To return back to topic, Valve wanna something Tarceri talks bullshit, discussion does not even exist many parties involved, things goes nowhere and so on

[ElderSnake]

Man, would dungeon be lost if the smiley emoticon disappeared

[dungeon]

Man, would dungeon be lost if the smiley emoticon disappeared

Try to not smiley on all this witchcraft - glvnd, gbm, glamor, gallium, gnome, gwayland, gxwayland, g64bit and g32bit, gdual ghead, gprime, gpulseaudio, gavahi, gpoettering, gsystemd overdeveloped gdiarrhea idea... glikely gmany gmore and gthen gon gtop gof git grun gVulkan gapp.

That is exactly what 16/32 Threadripper will handle so easely of course. But if someone asks for just ddx and vk, no, no, that is no go... who would buy our hardware if you are not fully bloated by design already