X.Org's S3 Graphics Driver Sees First Release In Seven Years - Still Pre-1.0

[kpedersen]

This hardware is not suitable even for web browsing or watching movies (I'm not talking about H.264, H.265 or VP8, but MPEG4). It can't even handle native resolution of FullHD displays! You have to be a masochist to use this nowadays.

There is more to computing than just browsing the web and watching videos haha.

Also, I don't know if you recall me saying it was a T23 Thinkpad... These are about 19 years old. I couldn't plug a "FullHD" display into the onboard VGA port even if I wanted to! XD

Plus, my "modern desktop" is basically command line only and the text actually looks less good on high resolution displays. 1024x768 is absolutely adequate for my usage. What is that, like iPhone resolution? They seem "modern" and popular enough.

Not to mention its usage pretty much consists entirely of checking if I am receiving a 1 or a 0 on the RS-232 RX pin and then compiling up some C code into a 32-bit (OMG!!! not 64-bit, is that legal?) binary to respond on the TX pin. It isn't even worth buying a $5 Raspberry Pi Zero (and $50 accessories) for that. XD

... its also more secure than your PC. Guaranteed because it remains offline

[the_scx]

the_scx seems stranegly upset by people enjoying open source, preservation of hardware and finding uses for old systems.

Do you enjoy to use desktop without 3D and video decoding acceleration? Do you prefer to use open source software even if it is unstable, unfinished and buggy crap? It looks like fanaticism to me.

He also seems strangely drawn to Windows and closed source development models (strange because this is Phoronix). ... however, it's only strange if I assume he's a good intentioned human. It's not strange at all, if I assume he's something else.

Linux is my primary and favorite system, but it doesn't mean that I'm blind and don't see obvious ills that affect it.

You want us to fight you the_scx? Do you want some angry debates over what largely amounts to personal preference?

Please don't act as a fanatic, who treat criticism of his favorite system as a reason to start a religious war. I'm tired of software wars.

We have a lot of high quality open source software, but there are areas where there are no real alternatives to proprietary software. This also applies to drivers.
Of course, the situation is significantly better than a dozen or so years ago:
- Catalyst driver (fglrx) for ATI Radeon was just a crap.
- Intel drivers were at an early stage of development.
- For many Wi-Fi chips, there were no drivers at all. The ones that existed were usually crap, although there were a few exceptions (e.g. Atheros).
- Configuring xDSL modems on USB was just a terrible experience.
- Support for TV cards was even worse.
- Hibernation and suspend didn't work as they should.
- Situation with peripheral devices was not better. HP printers and scanners were well supported, but drivers for most of the other devices were far from being perfect or didn't exist at all. The same applies to tablets: almost everything except Wacom was poorly supported.
Fortunately, these times are over, at least on x86 desktops. However, a new market is being created: ARM-based ACPC (Always Connected PC) devices, mainly laptops. Today, this hardware is just too expensive and it doesn't offer anything interesting. What's worse, Windows 10 on ARM is not as good as it could be. Unfortunately, Linux is even worse. Much worse. Almost all ills that have affected PCs with Linux 10 years ago are now occurring the Snapdragon-based ACPC devices with Linux. Freedreno driver not only worse than Nouveau, but even than Virgl and Softpipe! It is still far from supporting OpenGL 4.0! And everything else is in worse state: a few months ago, even support for Wi-Fi, USB 3.x, touchpad, touchscreen didn't work as it should. Today situation is not much better. And of course, you can forget about the transparent x86 emulation.
Today this market is nothing serious. However, the situation may change in the future. Snapdragon has already announced cheaper chips for ACPC devices - Snapdragon 7cx.
We should ask ourselves what will Linux be able to offer when the market takes shape? Will it fail, like it was on netbooks? In my opinion, without a good GPU driver, Linux is the plucky underdog here. Sorry, but I don't believe that Freedreno driver will be mature in the near future. In my opinion, Linux could benefit from the sane and stable driver model, similar to Windows. Unfortunately, nothing like this is currently planned.

The belief that once everything will be created on time is very naive. For example, there was no good alternative to Macromedia/Adobe Flash Player. Gnash was practically abandoned in 2012. There is no chance for a better alternative, because Flash itself will be deprecated in 2020. Situation is even worse when it comes to Macromedia Flash/Adobe Flash Professional. There were F4L, Qflash and UIRA, but none of them was usable.
Of course there were also swfmill, MTASC, SWFTools (swfc), Haxe, but their purpose was different. It's like comparing Photoshop to ImageMagick/GraphicsMagick, GD or GNU Plot.

[Guest]

Chrome9 HD (VX900 - Device Id: 7122 ~ 2010) and Chrome 640/645 (VX11 - Device Id: 3a01 ~ 2012) are fully supported on Windows by proprietary drivers.
https://www.catalog.update.microsoft...3-efcbef77ca68
https://www.catalog.update.microsoft...e-9f28f3f02dea
https://www.catalog.update.microsoft...3-48979525c9e4
On the other hand, Chrome 600 series is not supported by open source drivers at all, and OpenChrome for Chrome9 supports only basic 2D mode, without 3D acceleration. What's worse, MPEG4 decoding and dual head (multi-monitor support) are not implemented.
Open source is so awesome!
And if you think that this is because of a lack of documentation, you are simply wrong. It was released many years ago.
https://www.x.org/docs/via/OGPM_Chro...tI_Core_2D.pdf
https://www.x.org/docs/via/OGPM_Chro...I_3D_Video.pdf

See also:
Freedreno vs proprietary drivers
Lima vs proprietary drivers

I'm not saying that open source model is completely useless, but without vendor involvement, the results are always terrible, at least when it comes to complex hardware, like GPUs.

I have huge respect for Kevin Brace, but the truth is that just one hobbyist developer is not enough to develop such a driver. He hardly manages to adapt the code to modern Linux (kernel and X.Org), but that's all. There was no 3D acceleration for Chrome9 a decade ago, and today it still does not exist.

Of course, this driver (xf86-video-s3) is mainly about ViRGE and Savage GPUs, and as you can guess, they are almost unusable on the modern desktop. It is kind of equivalent of Intel740 (i740), when it comes to Intel chips, so it is really ancient hardware.
For the Unichrome-Chrome9 GPUs there is another driver - xf86-video-openchrome.

You're talking about ancient Windows drivers that seem to work simply because Microsoft tries to make their kernel be backwards compatible with old drivers. Try using old NVIDIA GPUs that had only Windows Vista drivers. You can install them on Windows 10 and they will work, because their crappy kernel attempts to support such old code (and that's ABI compatibility to make things worse).

[the_scx]

the same windows driver model that forced users to throw all their devices because they offered only 32-bit drivers?

Almost all drivers dedicated for Windows Vista/7 were 64-bit. I'm not saying that the Windows approach is perfect. However, we are not going to abandon x86-64 anytime soon. Anyway, in many cases, the Windows approach works better. Of course, I'm not suggesting to abandon open source drivers. I'm just opting for an alternative. Most open source drivers meet my expectations. However, I'm also trying to be a realist. I know that there are companies that will not provides source code anytime soon. This also applies to GPU vendors: NVIDIA (Quadro/GeForce/Tegra), VIA/S3G/Zhaoxin (Chrome), Qualcomm (Adreno), Imagination Technologies (PowerVR), ARM Holdings (Mali), Vivante (GC), etc.
In my opinion, the only reasonable solution in this situation is a stable driver model. The situation may change in 10 years and open source drivers will be good enough. However, I don't want to buy equipment that may be usable in 10 years. I want this hardware to be ready for use right now.

[the_scx]

There is more to computing than just browsing the web and watching videos haha.

So tell me, what are you doing on your desktop PC? Except trolling, of course.

Also, I don't know if you recall me saying it was a T23 Thinkpad... These are about 19 years old. I couldn't plug a "FullHD" display into the onboard VGA port even if I wanted to! XD

So you're a masochist... I feel sorry for you.

Plus, my "modern desktop" is basically command line only and the text actually looks less good on high resolution displays.

Do you use lynx or elinks for web browsing? Oh, I forgot. The web does not interest you at all.

... its also more secure than your PC. Guaranteed because it remains offline

Did you send the above comment telepathically?

[kpedersen]

So tell me, what are you doing on your desktop PC? Except trolling, of course.

On my desktop computer? That's none of your business
For the development laptop in question I use it to facilitate the development of prototype "game controllers" for simulation and arcade machines.

https://ibb.co/rwfmj78

https://ibb.co/4jLKmV3 -- You can even see the exact Thinkpad in action along with my "turtle gun". A modded water pistol as my first prototype.

New NUC and old Thinkpad in perfect harmony. No landfill necessary!

Do you use lynx or elinks for web browsing? Oh, I forgot. The web does not interest you at all.

Bingo! The web doesn't really interest me. I use some forums (because they don't require much javascript but much rather mailing lists. I generally don't run into development issues these days since I only ever use C and C++ but if I do, I find classic books to be more useful. Things like Stack overflow doesn't yield correct enough answers to justify loading up a web browser.

Did you send the above comment telepathically?

I own more than one computer. I call this one "online-cesspit". It is basically a FreeBSD jail that runs sloppy / broken software like web browsers without potentially damaging my environment.

[the_scx]

On my desktop computer? That's none of your business

It is clear to my that you don't use this Thinkpad T23 as a desktop computer at all, so I don't see the point why you even mentioned it here.
What is more, you don't use any modern system on it (Debian Etch was supported until 2010), so you don't need driver updates to support a new kernel or X.Org.
Moreover, this news is about the userspace xf86-video-s3 driver. It has nothing to do with KMS, and you don't even use X11 on this machine.
So tell me, what is the point of this discussion?

[cybertraveler]

So tell me, what is the point of this discussion?

I think that might be a question for you.

Really.

Go deep. Explore the motivations behind everything you wrote. You'll save yourself a lot of future suffering.

I know it's kind-of an ass thing to do to give strangers advice like this, but I wish someone had been an ass 10 years ago and given me that kind of suggestion (IE go within and look at what your motivations are).

(I obviously don't expect you to type your motivations here. That's for you)

With love,

-CT

[kpedersen]

Like I said, if KMS would be supported for the Savage, I would actually consider updating my 19 year old hardware. This seems unlikely but it could only ever come from the open-source community.

It is important to note that the closed source development model would never release an updated driver 19 years after the hardware is released. If KMS was to appear for the Savage, it would be less likely to come from the original manufacturer / proprietary vendor than a lone guy working on it as a hobby. I find that fact quite funny.

But these were statements, there was never really much to discuss.

It is clear to my that you don't use this Thinkpad T23 as a desktop computer at all, so I don't see the point why you even mentioned it here.

Also, for the record, I don't have a desktop computer. Ironically I find that setup a bit old fashioned and 90's. Instead I have a 2011 Thinkpad (X220i) and a bunch of different rack servers (ranging from a Sun Fire V210 (sparc64) to a boring old HP Proliant DL360p (amd64) to do the main heavy lifting.).

[libv]

Like I said, if KMS would be supported for the Savage,

Savage was almost exclusively AGP 2x/4x. PCI savages are relatively rare in comparison. I have a handul of agp ones, even one with DFP (the predecessor to DVI), but none with pci.
PCI/PCI-E to AGP bridge cards only had one very limited commercial release, and some hobbyists (usually 3dfx fanatics) where it is not clear how far they got.

So basically, you have to still be running 2003 to 2005 motherboards if you wish to use x86-64. Which means that you should have replaced your caps already.

S3 vision/trio kms i would understand (there are cheap pci-e to pci bridge cards). S3 Savage is pointless.