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

[phoronix]

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

Today a new drm-misc-next pull request was submitted for DRM-Next of various Direct Rendering Manager changes queuing for Linux 6.3. Most significant with today's pull request is eliminating seven old DRM drivers that are for vintage hardware and these open-source drivers are no longer maintained...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.3-Dropping-Old-DRM

[mos87]

3Dfx

oh noes

[pegasus]

Good memories of mga driver and directfb ... back when it looked like magic to have 6 vga outputs on the back of a PC, two from G400 and 4 from Millenium cards.

[caligula]

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.

[agd5f]

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.

[Beherit]

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.

Depends on how you define "fairly recent". Yes, around 20 years ago I remember most/all server boards (Tyan Tiger comes to mind for some reason) used an integrated rage 128 chip for the display.

[pegasus]

Doesn't some fairly recent server/workstation motherboard with integrated graphics still use the old ati rage driver?

And plenty of Aspeed vga out there in the field are based on mga g200 ...

[FireBurn]

Happy memories of my Voodoo Banshee card, pretty sure it was one of the first 2D & 3D cards on the market, was mesmerised (and terrified) playing Unreal & System Shock 2 at 1600x1200 resolution on a CRT monitor with surround sound

[rene]

. sad ...

[osw89]

What exactly is the benefit of deleting these old drivers? Since they weren't being actively maintained I assume they weren't taking up precious dev time so what adverse effect does their continued presence in the kernel have?