Linux 6.3 To Remove Obsolete GPU Drivers: ATI Rage 128, 3Dfx, S3 Savage, i810 & More

[sinepgib]

anyone still using such hardware are unlikely to be using a modern kernel anyhow

This claim is most often wrong. Those are not some embedded hardware that is deployed once and never touched again. Whoever uses it (if anyone does) is probably using some of the more lightweight maintained distros with a modern kernel. Stuff like antix or possibly vanilla Debian.
What those computers are probably not running is modern, full fledged desktops, or the latest Firefox, as they don't have enough power for that. But kernels? Most likely yes.
A few years ago (maybe 4?) my mom had an active Unichrome computer running Arch, obviously with the latest kernel.

All that said, I think it's quite sensible to drop these drivers. Nowadays they are essentially an expensive way to set up VESA anyway, Mesa dropped them long ago and I'm not sure even X.org uses it for 2D accel anymore. If used at all, it's probably only for compositing, given most toolkits now use OpenGL and would use llvmpipe instead. Just use the VESA driver.

[mifritscher]

I actually do use Debian Bullseye on a P3-800 laptop with a i810 GPU - and it works quite well. Yes, with Xorg. Even playing UT with wine^^ Which matches on the Panasonic Thoughbook CF-28^^

[sinepgib]

I actually do use Debian Bullseye on a P3-800 laptop with a i810 GPU - and it works quite well. Yes, with Xorg. Even playing UT with wine^^ Which matches on the Panasonic Thoughbook CF-28^^

Oh, yes, the mention to X.org was about it being accelerated, not about not running. My mom of course used X.org, she's not that tech-savvy. I configured the computer, she'd mostly just use the browser and LibreOffice.
It was a bit more "modern" tho, an Athlon64 X2 with a whooping 2GB of RAM.

[torsionbar28]

Doesn't some fairly recent server/workstation motherboard with integrated graphics still use the old ati rage driver? The latest discrete rage card isn't even older than Nvidia GeForce.

rage128 GPUs are about 25 years old at this point. They pre-dated the original radeon hardware which came out in 2000.

When it launched is not really relevant. What's the most recent implementation of this hardware? I know I have servers that are only a few years old, that have onboard Matrox MGA graphics. After all, the intel x86 architecture was introduced in 1978... we're way overdue for deprecating that, right?

[mangeek]

Ha! I've been using Linux so long, I remember waiting for drivers that let these chips work.

So long, Voodoo, i810, Savage, and Rage, you all served us well.

[Developer12]

Is that the same rage card running in the Sun Ultra 5?

Hopefully the guy working to upstream the VIA support in MESA can get the kernel driver code moved to newer DRM subsystems and re-accepted.

[mangeek]

I actually do use Debian Bullseye on a P3-800 laptop with a i810 GPU - and it works quite well. Yes, with Xorg. Even playing UT with wine^^ Which matches on the Panasonic Thoughbook CF-28^^

Wow. I actually miss my P3. The later model P3s were great CPUs and I was happy when they came back in the form of Core Solo and Core Duo and replaced NetBurst.

Still, you might end up saving enough $$$ in power to justify replacing that P3 with an Atom board. If you do want to keep it around, old Kernel 6.2 archives and archived Debian installer images will always be available, it's not like modern kernel development is gonna improve things for that system anyways.

[agd5f]

When it launched is not really relevant. What's the most recent implementation of this hardware? I know I have servers that are only a few years old, that have onboard Matrox MGA graphics. After all, the intel x86 architecture was introduced in 1978... we're way overdue for deprecating that, right?

rage128s were not used in any server boards. They were desktop and laptop cards that were quickly replaced by radeons. You are thinking of RageXL (mach64) which was used for a while in servers, but that was replaced by the ES1000/RN50 which were radeon based. AMD has not sold a server display chip in about 10 years at this point. That said, the drivers which were dropped are not KMS drivers. They were DRI1 drivers which facilitated 3D rendering. If you don't have the dri1 drivers, you don't get 3D, but none of the server chips supported 3D anyway because these were server chips designed to show a console and be cheap. The ES1000/RN50 are supported by the radeon driver which does support KMS and is still in the tree. Everything else used Xorg drivers in userspace to actually drive the display regardless of whether there was a dri1 driver present or not. Additionally the Matrox server chips are supported by a different driver with KMS support which is still in the tree. On top of that, they also do not support 3D so the mga driver that was removed has no baring on them at all. So if you have a server with any of these chips in it, these removals will not affect you at all.

[Beherit]

Anyway, it would be possible to install another GPU.

Or just replace their antique museum piece with a raspberry pi and save money on both getting a gfx card and on electricity.

[Berniyh]

When it launched is not really relevant. What's the most recent implementation of this hardware? I know I have servers that are only a few years old, that have onboard Matrox MGA graphics. After all, the intel x86 architecture was introduced in 1978... we're way overdue for deprecating that, right?

But do you actually need that mga driver for such a server?
Won't it bring up a basic console using simple framebuffer without the mga driver?
In the end that's all you need on a server (if ever), I'd say.