Early Adopters Already Hit By Fedora Dropping Old Linux GPU Drivers

[Tom B]

I don't see the problem with running an old kernel/xorg on old hardware. Expecting a Kernel from 2014 to run hardware from 1999 is ridiculous, just run an older version of the OS if you need to run older hardware.

[curaga]

The thing is they are not dropping support just because its old hardware. They are dropping support because the software is old and works in a way that modern drivers don't. If someone was to add DRM/KMS support to these drivers then they would still be supported. However finding someone to do it is the problem. There has been talk of adding support for some of them before, even in these forums but it has never happened. This guy once said he might do it but his blog is now offline: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...tem&px=MTE2Mzk

From the contributor's POV, there is little to no advantage in doing that work.

Would implementing KMS for say SiS:
- improve performance?
- reduce VRAM use?
- allow a previously non-working application to work, such as Youtube?

No to all three, for followers not familiar with it. Why would someone learn kernel programming and bother with the usual kernel submission difficulties, if the only reward for weeks of work was one flicker less on boot, and happy Fedora decisionmakers?

[tarceri]

From the contributor's POV, there is little to no advantage in doing that work.

Would implementing KMS for say SiS:
- improve performance?
- reduce VRAM use?
- allow a previously non-working application to work, such as Youtube?

No to all three, for followers not familiar with it. Why would someone learn kernel programming and bother with the usual kernel submission difficulties, if the only reward for weeks of work was one flicker less on boot, and happy Fedora decisionmakers?

You obviously missed the article I pointed to before the site when down. Basically the guy loved his old laptop and was willing to go the extra mile to make sure it was still supported into the future. Its only fedora now but once the ball starts rolling its will be hard to stop.

I guess the other reason would be purely for interest and learning, people waste their time learning and coding less useful things all the time.

[dungeon]

Well 15 years, dog can't live that much

[GreatEmerald]

Hm, this also makes me wonder, what about Wayland? You need EGL to run it. That probably means that a lot of these old drivers won't be ported to Wayland, right?

[lepetit]

I don't see the problem with running an old kernel/xorg on old hardware. Expecting a Kernel from 2014 to run hardware from 1999 is ridiculous, just run an older version of the OS if you need to run older hardware.

and for security flaw ? feature add ?

[hansdegoede]

Hi All,

Fedora graphics team member here. I hope I can shed some light on the issue discussed here.

As announced in various places including the devel list:

https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2013-October/190696.html

We (the graphics team), have decided to stop supporting the old non kms drivers (except for the vesa driver), but this does not mean that we will block community members from picking them up and maintaining them (for now, in the future not being kms capable may really become a blocker). Actually when announcing this we've explicitly asked for community members to step up, to maintain these drivers, because atm there are no technical blockers to include these in Fedora. We just need someone to do the work of maintaining them.

So if any Fedora users are reading this, and they have hardware which needs these drivers, then feel free to unretire the driver in question. If you are already a Fedora packager then you can walk through:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Orphaned_package_that_need_new_maintainers#Claiming_Ownership_of_a_Retired_Package

If you are not and you are willing to become a packager, please read:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Join_the_package_collection_maintainers

I'm willing to act as a sponsor for new-packagers interested in re-introducing (some of) the old drivers. You can use the re-review required to re-introduce a retired package as a package for your first review. Please also create at least 1 truly new package from scratch (*), so that I get a change to see your packaging skills before sponsoring you.

Regards,

Hans

*) if you've nothing you want to see packaged yourself, then see:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Package_maintainers_wishlist

[jsa1983]

I used to have a Trident Cyberblade XP powered toshiba laptop (honestly, what a piece of shit of a GPU!) back in year 2001, but if I recall correctly that GPU could work with both the trident Xorg driver and the vesa Xorg driver (and I must say they performed at more or less the same speed, but with vesa XV video could not be played fullscreen). I presume the vesa driver is still mantained, isn't it? If so, what is the problem? That 13+ years old home server is not used for GPU intensive tasks, so a simple desktop environment is more than enough.

[Slartifartblast]

Old Dogs

Eventually old dogs have to take a trip to the vets.

[Gusar]

but with vesa XV video could not be played fullscreen [...] what is the problem?

You identified one problem right there, vesa doesn't provide Xv. With Xv you could still use the machine for video watching.

Without Xv, fullscreen video playback is still possible, but scaling needs to be done in software in this case, taxing the CPU that already has its hands full with video decoding even more, so you might not be able to play videos that could be played if Xv was available.