Mesa Will Not Be Dropping Its Older GPU Drivers

[dungeon]

Haha, not really . It was my old Sempron 2500+ (1.4GHz) on Lubuntu, I don't know what was CPU usage, but it was quite smooth and fast using MPV, it didn't even struggle while seeking forward/backward. It did strugle playing 360p videos on youtube tho .

PS: I've just googled it, it's ~62W TDP .

Nope, no way i don't think that is possible on single core 1.4GHz, are you talking about 720P HD maybe instead of 1080p ? Or maybe if bitrate is so unusualy low, so just particular sample or so.

Also, something does not sounds right also, mpv is not so good on old hardware you can get better from mplayer... but even without that you already broken a world record with this claim so OK

On wattage i meant for the whole PC in comparison to Pi Zero in my mind, so i must smile

[leipero]

mulenmar Yeah, that's right, I can't even remmember what type of codec it used..., it was mkv container, and I'm quite positive it was x264 tho. The fact is that VLC can't play it actually, it stutters, and it's terrible, MPV (or mplayer) on the other hand plays it flawlessly.

schmidtbag They can, it's repurposed PC for network, did try it for fun. If i remmember corectly that old hardware works better with Firefox on GNU/Linux (unlike newer hardware that works better with Chrome/Chromium).

dungeon It depends on video/codec i guess, didn't tried that much, and I can't now since i do not have access to that PC (only via network atm), it also depends on player, VLC can't play sh** on that PC, only 360p-480p videos..., MPV or mplayer plays it well for some reason, i was suprized also, it's all default settings.

I really can't remmember what was the actual player, maybe it was mplayer? Is that default Lubuntu player? Because that system is installed like year ago, and I can't remmember what I've installed on it.., if i did add mpv or what, if mplayer is default player on lubuntu, youa re right, it is likely mplayer .

[Marc Driftmeyer]

Quite frankly, you're an asshole.

There's no such thing as planned obsolescence in the tech industry outside of Apple, and especially not in Open Source. Yes companies drop hardware support in drivers over time, but it is absolutely not out of some malicious intent to force you to pay them more money. The reason they drop hardware support is because it isn't worth their time to work on it because it's not a current or future product (and quite often it's a completely obsolete crap product that they're dropping support for) , and continuing to support it is getting in the way and is only of benefit to a rapidly diminishing population anyway.

In Open Source however things are a bit different, because if you and I do mean you, want support for your 20 year old obsolete crap, then you are free to go in and maintain and update the code yourself. If that support gets dropped then you have no one to blame but yourself. And the only answer to "Oh but I don't know C" is you go learn it or... pay someone to support it for you. You are not entitled to anyone's support or anyone's labour. If you want something then it is on you to either do it yourself or pay for someone to do it. No excuses. There's plenty of free resources online. If you can't do that... then tough luck

People's asinine assumption that just because their hardware still somehow manages to run means that they're entitled to free software updates forever gets in my way and everyone else's who has to deal with the nonsense of people like you. If you want to run that hardware until it no longer works... fine... do that, and if you want to put in the effort to keep it working... then great... otherwise you get updates until the people who are actually doing the work decide you don't anymore, and you have no right to anything beyond that point. Got it?

Your credibility flew in the face of first hand SV experience across the spectrum. End of Life is a planned obsolescence and the reason there are enterprise extended support contracts.

[LeJimster]

These mesa devs need to get together in the same room for a few days to hash things out. This used to happen in the past but I read somewhere that it hasn't been happening recently down to cost cutting.

Seems to me, branching off old drivers would be a good idea if its holding back the new drivers and they aren't being properly maintained anyway.

[dungeon]

dungeon It depends on video/codec i guess, didn't tried that much, and I can't now since i do not have access to that PC (only via network atm), it also depends on player, VLC can't play sh** on that PC, only 360p-480p videos..., MPV or mplayer plays it well for some reason, i was suprized also, it's all default settings.

I really can't remmember what was the actual player, maybe it was mplayer? Is that default Lubuntu player? Because that system is installed like year ago, and I can't remmember what I've installed on it.., if i did add mpv or what, if mplayer is default player on lubuntu, youa re right, it is likely mplayer .

Also maybe GL does not play video in your case, maybe it is Xv and for that you don't need Mesa.

These older cards have real 2D hardware engine and i think Xv proper might be same or even better, it have also textured Xv one whis use 3D engine, but that is off of mesa in ddx so does not require it.... basically in your case i think you don't need GL so Mesa at all to accelerate videos.

[smitty3268]

Also maybe GL does not play video in your case, maybe it is Xv and for that you don't need Mesa.

These older cards have real 2D hardware engine and i think Xv proper might be same or even better, it have also textured Xv one whis use 3D engine, but that is off of mesa in ddx so does not require it.... basically in your case i think you don't need GL so Mesa at all to accelerate videos.

You forgot the smiley.

You're correct though. Those old cards don't have any decode acceleration in them. What they had was Xv support in the DDX drivers.

[dungeon]

I think that these decoders are bullshit, sometimes people buy entire new hardware just to get up to date decoder and that decoder is worth probably couple bucks

Sometimes people even goes into entire debates as to who have more up to date decoder, but it is not worth even to speak about it how much cheap that crap is

[Luke_Wolf]

Your credibility flew in the face of first hand SV experience across the spectrum. End of Life is a planned obsolescence and the reason there are enterprise extended support contracts.

As I said... Only at Apple.

Unlike at Apple everywhere else where software must support multiple (and since we're talking PC sphere a ridiculous number of different) platforms doesn't just arbitrarily cut off support for hardware. There's no hard EOLs for hardware support in the PC sphere, and there isn't any promise of support time for anything other than Government and Enterprise contracts. Hardware continues to be supported with new drivers until it's inconvenient to continue to do so. For example: a consumer HP laserjet printer from 2004 we have had support until 2015, and GPU drivers have generally continued to be updated for hardware until massive architectural changeover (see VLIW -> GCN).

Now sure Windows, RHEL, etc all have highly planned lifespans, but there's no upgrade treadmill there as long as there aren't new required hardware features nothing is forcing you to buy new hardware, and there's no timer built in to disable features X years after product launch. If you want to you can simply ride it forever. Furthermore the support continues for around 10 years, geeze man so much pressure to run the upgrade treadmill, this planned obsolescence thing takes so long that my hardware will probably have failed before my software update support does, and I can renew for another ten years if I pay $100 for the next Windows version (or pay nothing with Linux and keep renewing for 2-4 years of support until it's finally too inconvenient to support me... but then I can go use Gentoo). Arbitrary time bombs to force upgrades is an Apple thing, which is why it's you of all people attempting to rebut.

Meanwhile if I want to I can drag out any PC that supports NX-bit and install the current version of windows on it and it'll work just fine (within the limitation of what drivers are available for it, although you can go at least as far back as Windows 7 drivers in most cases), Linux you can go further back.

And when it comes to Software vendors well... let's put it this way: support for 32-bit XP era machines continued even after Microsoft cut off all support, before they finally moved to SSE2 builds which means still oh... 15 years of supported hardware, and each ISV has their own approach to versioning and support of the software itself. However, unless your ISV is an asshole there aren't any timebombs, and instead you simply don't get the features of the next major version. There are plenty of vendors that are assholes like that but generally for the consumer market it isn't a thing.

Now do I like this situation? No. It results in software not taking full advantage of my hardware, and things like making binaries be 32-bit because it fits the lowest common denominator, but I think it's quite obvious that outside of Apple nobody has any plans to stop you using any particular hardware, in order to force you to shell out money to stay on the upgrade treadmill.

Now inb4 "buh... buh... muh phones" and "buh... buh... muh consoles" yes those can be argued to experience planned obsolescence for the same reason as Apple devices but we were talking about PCs and a guy whining that his 20 year old PC was having it's support threatened because "planned obsolescence".

[onicsis]

Michael Larabel[/URL] in Linux Gaming]Is it just me or are open-source games faltering? While open-source, community-based games really aren't mainstream and really never took off, it seems these days there's a lack of good open-source games more so than in past years as well as diminishing open-source game engine projects.

These days the open-source game projects that come to mind for me are the 0 A.D. real-time strategy game and the Xonotic and Warsow and Unvanquished first person shooters. However, Unvanquished has now been in an alpha state for years and Xonotic updates are far and few between. There are also some open-source projects seeking to do engine re-implementations of closed-source titles, such as OpenMW and then all of the 2D games and those I really wouldn't put in the same section as modern (for their time), quality titles.

So is it just me or do you also feel that the open-source game scene for quality work has been on a downward trajectory in recent years? Share your thoughts in our forums. Fortunately, and possibly as part of the reason for this downward slope, is that there have been more interesting closed-source games available natively for Linux gamers along with quality game engines that are increasingly accessible to indie developers like Unity and Unreal Engine 4.

Perfect video card from 2004 {ATI Radeon 9700/128MB RAM/AGP} for that kind of games, ioquake3 based.

Actually I have few of those ATI video cards but not AGP mainboard. Old mainboard for the Athlon, got rusted by time, dampness and weather.

[mulenmar]

You are confusing i915 the kernel driver and i915 the Mesa driver. Those OpenGL 2.1 graphics are supported by i965. I think the latest hardware that i915 (the Mesa driver) supports is something like GMA 950 (or similar) and that's not capable of OpenGL 2.x.

Took a lot longer than I thought to be able to get back to the laptop in question, sorry.

Judging from /var/log/Xorg.0.log, it is indeed using the i915 Mesa driver.

Relevant lines:

[ 17.653] (--) intel(0): Integrated Graphics Chipset: Intel(R) 945GM
[ 17.676] (II) intel(0): [DRI2] DRI driver: i915
[ 17.676] (II) intel(0): direct rendering: DRI2 enabled
[ 18.136] (II) AIGLX: Loaded and initialized i915

That's after I finally did the Mesa update that dropped the OpenGL support down to 1.4. So Mesa's i915 is indeed what is being used as the driver, but you're quite right about what the hardware supports.