AGP Graphics Card Support Proposed For Removal From Linux Radeon/NVIDIA Drivers

[angrypie]

AGP was kinda hackish anyway. Thank fuck we have PCIe.

[M@GOid]

I am of the opinion that if you want to use vintage hardware, use vintage software with it.

I call BS at anyone coming here proclaiming they still use 20 year old hardware in a daily basis, that absolutely need a up-to-date kernel/distro. I use myself a decrepit netbook with a 32 bit only Atom, that had support dropped from major distros a while ago and I didn't get butt-hurt for it. The little thing flies in a old distro, but is as slow as molasses with a modern one. Not to mention using the modern web.

Using old and obsolete hardware with modern software sucks, people should let it go. You are not "saving the environment" by needlessly using old crap to the last inch of its life. Get over it.

[StandaSK]

From the comments I assume the AGP cards would still work, it's just that the bus would be slower - limited to PCI speeds.

What would be the performance hit from this?

[agd5f]

"AGP" support in this context just means that it uses the chipset maintained MMU for scatter/gather device access to system memory. Radeon hardware also has a built in MMU for scatter/gather access to system memory. So disabling AGP support just means you use the on-device MMU rather rather than the chipset one. In practice, the on-device MMU is much less buggy than the chipset ones. For PCIe, the chipset AGP aperture went away in favor of device specific MMUs.

[TemplarGR]

I never understood why people make a big fuss about dropping 15-20 year old hardware support. Most of the time hardware that old dies from old age, even if for some people that level of performance was adequate. Capacitors die, transistors die (yes they do die with time as electrons keep passing through their gates). Even if such hardware still functions it sucks performance wise and can be replaced by very cheap modern hardware. And if for some reason you have hardware like it and it still works, you can still use it with the latest LTS kernel/distro. No reason to force people to support your shit.

And even if the latest LTS software has stopped getting updates, you can still use it without updates. It is not the end of the world. It is not like you were expecting new software developments for your museum piece anyway...

Seriously, i can understand people who use 5 or 10 year old hardware. These days the performance leaps are small and hardware can be adequate for longer. But 15 or 20? Just drop it.

[schmidtbag]

I'd say AGP is worth dropping. R600 and nv50 are, IMO, the oldest drivers worth worrying about. Any hardware older than what those support either isn't going to see any more updates or won't see noteworthy benefit from newer versions of Mesa. That being said, the best AGP cards (to my knowledge) are the HD 4650 and 7950GT. I think the former is R500, which doesn't really see any more updates, and the latter is I think nv40.

As said in another thread:
We need to see a distro that keeps legacy hardware alive and maintained, while making the efforts for modern hardware easier.

[Roger Odle]

We should appreciate that Linux is last to abondon support of old hardware. This is no doubt do to the large number of developers whose access to resources is vastly different from each other. Compared to other OS developers, there is a greater chance that a developer is using older hardware. So the interest to stick with older hardware persists longer for Linux. The most significant reason for Linux to abandon hardware is that the developers don't have access to it, can't test it, can't measure the quality to the software running it. Other people through software over the wall untested to hope someone else will debug it. Linux doesn't do that.

[andre30correia]

I never understood why people make a big fuss about dropping 15-20 year old hardware support. Most of the time hardware that old dies from old age, even if for some people that level of performance was adequate. Capacitors die, transistors die (yes they do die with time as electrons keep passing through their gates). Even if such hardware still functions it sucks performance wise and can be replaced by very cheap modern hardware. And if for some reason you have hardware like it and it still works, you can still use it with the latest LTS kernel/distro. No reason to force people to support your shit.

And even if the latest LTS software has stopped getting updates, you can still use it without updates. It is not the end of the world. It is not like you were expecting new software developments for your museum piece anyway...

Seriously, i can understand people who use 5 or 10 year old hardware. These days the performance leaps are small and hardware can be adequate for longer. But 15 or 20? Just drop it.

In Africa this old hardware still exists and is important

[DanL]

That being said, the best AGP cards (to my knowledge) are the HD 4650 and 7950GT. I think the former is R500

RadeonHD 4000 series was R700.
Radeon X1000 series = R500

[HyperDrive]

"AGP" support in this context just means that it uses the chipset maintained MMU for scatter/gather device access to system memory. Radeon hardware also has a built in MMU for scatter/gather access to system memory. So disabling AGP support just means you use the on-device MMU rather rather than the chipset one. In practice, the on-device MMU is much less buggy than the chipset ones. For PCIe, the chipset AGP aperture went away in favor of device specific MMUs.

So this just disables the GART? If it's just that, I guess it's fine (it was a nice idea on paper, horribly slow in practice). But what about the AGP signalling speeds, are they also dropping to 1x?