Marking DRI1 Drivers As Legacy & "Broken" Being Debated

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Marking DRI1 Drivers As Legacy & "Broken" Being Debated

Earlier this month David Herrmann sent out two kernel patches to hide "legacy" DRM drivers behind a new Kconfig switch and make these DRI1 drivers depend upon the kernel's "BROKEN" option. Not all are happy about these patches...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Legacy-DRI1-Broken-Debate

[schmidtbag]

Anyone with a system old enough to have one of these GPUs is not going to benefit from newer kernels and versions of Xorg. These days, it's productively and financially detrimental to use such systems. If you're really so tight on money that you can't even afford an old PCI GPU, I don't think you'll mind using a slightly outdated distro. Even if someone maintained them, they're too weak to really be of any use for modern software. Modern CPUs can probably render faster than them.

I personally am in favor of DRI1 drivers being marked as legacy. These developers really need to stop getting so worked up over hardware that's nearly useless for modern software.

[microcode]

Anyone with a system old enough to have one of these GPUs is not going to benefit from newer kernels and versions of Xorg. These days, it's productively and financially detrimental to use such systems. If you're really so tight on money that you can't even afford an old PCI GPU, I don't think you'll mind using a slightly outdated distro. Even if someone maintained them, they're too weak to really be of any use for modern software. Modern CPUs can probably render faster than them.

I personally am in favor of DRI1 drivers being marked as legacy. These developers really need to stop getting so worked up over hardware that's nearly useless for modern software.

Clearly the better solution is to port DRI3 to the Voodoo3.

[Azrael5]

via developers could work to make better as well as modern BIOSes over PT880 PT890 motherboards in order to improve performance from CPUs DDR2 VGA and sound. I use DDR2 over 4coredual-sata2 motherboards and cannot set 8-way over ddr2 because of system inability to check correctly the amount of RAM switching to single channel wrongly measure of it. I cannot use VL805 USB 3.0 card over PT880 pcie slot, because it is unrecognizable although vl805 chip is stated to be compliant with pcie 1.0a spec. So it's not understandable the reason of modernizing software over old BIOS motherboards.

[Azrael5]

by the way... another motherboard supporting PT880 4Gb of RAM disable BANK INTERLEAVE when 4 DIMMs are used. Bios from award.... So question is why they didn't specialize some team to make newer BIOSes!?

[starshipeleven]

3dfx Banshee/Voodoo3+, Intel i810, Matrox G200/G400, SiS, VIA, and Savage graphics card code would be hidden a CONFIG_DRM_LEGACY

No, no no. That should be killed with fire, not hidden. Kill. Them. With. Fire.

MAYBE I'd save Intel as it's integrated and isn't total shit, but the rest... no. just no.

Kevin Brace, the lone developer still working on the OpenChrome DDX driver, has also written his thoughts against it with an anti-consumerism rant.

Showing how he lost his sanity. That's crap hardware that has always been crap, it's now dead as VIA has been MIA from x86 scene since like 2013 or even earlier.

Any effort should be focused on hardware that is still in production, not ancient stuff that was garbage even when new.

[schmidtbag]

MAYBE I'd save Intel as it's integrated and isn't total shit, but the rest... no. just no.

This is Intel i810, which is actually total shit. This series was so bad it is the reason why people to this day still think Intel has horrible GPUs, when in fact their modern ones are modestly capable.

[starshipeleven]

via developers could work to make better as well as modern BIOSes over PT880 PT890 motherboards in order to improve performance from CPUs DDR2 VGA and sound.

Via cannot because they sell the chips, but the company that made the board (and the BIOS) is another.

So it's not understandable the reason of modernizing software over old BIOS motherboards.

No it is not. The development effort of trying to fix all the shit that happens on ancient boards (it's not a mathematic addition or a copy-paste, it's about hacking together some solution to a weird hardware-based problem linked with board design or something like that, that requires non-trivial development time) would require much more resources than just replacing the board with one that does not suck.

For like 10-20$ you can get another socket 775 mobo that supports your processor and ram and has none of these issues.

I'm pretty sure that you can get one with an Intel chipset instead, those didn't suck hard like VIA or SiS chipsets.

[starshipeleven]

This is Intel i810, which is actually total shit.

Hmm, good catch. Must have mixed up something, yes. I thought i810 wasn't THAT ONE on PIII boards. No exclusion for it then, everything in that list must be killed with fire.

This series was so bad it is the reason why people to this day still think Intel has horrible GPUs, when in fact their modern ones are modestly capable.

Hm, so it likely was duby's first GPU. All his rants about how bad intel iGPUs are and how Intel is killing gaming must have been born on the frustration generated by trying to play on this thing.

[dungeon]

Eh, beautuful DRI1 days... i remember fast and hyperz days of that even with r200. It probably still works, with mesa 7.5 or something after that it just getting slower and rotted...

And how it goes history will repeat itself i would probably remember radeon driver too on GCN 1..1 as best one, as amdgpu is kinda borked for that