Five Updates For Vintage X.Org Drivers

[tormod]

These cards are not "crippled". They can do everything they were designed to do, and still can. Crippled is when you can't use all features (any longer) because the drivers would not let you. Like if you had to use the vesa driver because the specific driver died. Or if there was no Linux driver for your new, expensive card.

cl333r, who are you to judge anyone doing some constructive work? Even if a developer were the only user of a card he is very much welcome to fix the driver for himself and push the fix upstream.

[hwertz]

do these drivers supply any form of hardware acceleration, or are they pretty much just there so you can configure additional screens with xorg.conf and a full color spectrum?

They sure do. I used an S3 Virge back in the day, and it supported both 2D and XVideo. Ditto Trident Cyberblade (which actually was supported far better in Linux than in Windows). These cards may be old but they aren't THAT old. By the time I started using Linux in 1993 or 1994, I had an (unaccelerated) Oak OTI-067 but companies were already in full swing trying to make their cards as fast as possible (mainly for use with Windows 3.1 or OS/2, but XFree86 was supporting these as well.)

I don't insist, and they're belittling themselves by working for a whooping user-base of like 25 users, actually even less since probably not all of them are Linux users.

I respectfully disagree. If they were making some major architectural changes to these drivers, I'd say it's generally a waste of time (as long as some servers aren't still using these chips) and agree with you. However, these appear to be very minor patches, and likely the same types of patches already had to be made to other drivers to bring them up to XOrg 1.12 standards (meaning there was a general pattern to follow.) Therefore I would guess very little time was invested in these patches, so no reason not to do it.

[LinuxID10T]

Old? yes. Obscure? No.

F

I completely, utterly agree.

[mattst88]

Just to be clear, are you saying that those drivers should be killed off ? Those are the only two choices -- keep them working with new versions of X or kill them off.

He's under the impression that if Julien hadn't spent the small amount of time it took to do these releases that he would have completed some task that cl333r would find more useful. You know, because Julien should take directions from trolls on the Phoronix forums.

[bridgman]

I don't insist, and they're belittling themselves by working for a whooping user-base of like 25 users, actually even less since probably not all of them are Linux users.

Just to be clear, are you saying that those drivers should be killed off ? Those are the only two choices -- keep them working with new versions of X or kill them off.

[russofris]

The new xf86-video driver releases this weekend are for APM, i740, Newport, S3, and S3Virge. These are DDX drivers for old and rather obscure graphics processors.

Old? yes. Obscure? No.

F

[jhansonxi]

If they had fixed the i740 driver two years ago, they'd have 26 users.

[cl333r]

Why do you insist on belittling the work of others?

I don't insist, and they're belittling themselves by working for a whooping user-base of like 25 users, actually even less since probably not all of them are Linux users.

[mattst88]

Those devs are fighting windmills and winning, great.. actually it's pathetic.

Why do you insist on belittling the work of others?

Is this even worth reporting?

No.

[curaga]

Why yes, they all do XAA 2d accel