Fedora 21 Will Try To Abandon Non-KMS GPU Drivers

[mcpierce]

A very misleading and inaccurate title...

Fedora is not "abandoning" those drivers at all. The current maintainer of the packages has said he's ORPHANING them, which allows someone else with the time to ADOPT them.

Fedora isn't removing the packages from the distribution.

[chithanh]

Ok, so what happens when you open up a web browser?

Netsurf works fine on low-end devices, thank you.

Just getting a desktop and maybe a very small .doc file open in Abiword isn't enough to justify the power draw over replacing it with a modern 3.9-18w nettop that is faster at everything.

Of course the user can compare electricity costs and cost of replacement with something more modern, and may possibly reach the conclusion that buying new hardware is better. But at least the decision is left to the user and he is not forced to abandon his old hardware.

If electricity bills and IT equipment are paid from different budgets (which is the case in many schools), organizations are even interested in prolonging life of computers beyond where it would make sense if both came from the same budget. Back in the day, I helped a school run DOSVNC on 386s with 4 MB RAM and NE2000 ISA cards as cheap Internet terminals. Bonus, they could be left unsupervised and needed no theft deterrent.

[Kivada]

Who says they need to handle Gnome shell? Driving a laptop panel at its native resolution, or being able to configure an external monitor would be a start.
Lightweight desktop environments like LXDE work fine even on a 15 year old machine with 256 MB RAM.

Ok, so what happens when you open up a web browser? Just getting a desktop and maybe a very small .doc file open in Abiword isn't enough to justify the power draw over replacing it with a modern 3.9-18w nettop that is faster at everything.

[Kivada]

It's too bad that Kabini has a GCN GPU - that means the currently-worse-quality radeonsi over r600g.

You act like that wouldn't still be faster then what he was claiming to be running, The HD8330 with current state OSS drivers would still be far faster then a Rage128 from around 15 years ago.

[chithanh]

Additionally, you can't bang on hw directly from userspace on secureboot enabled systems.

You are right, but then again systems which still contain such old graphics probably don't have secureboot.

Moreover, XAA support was dropped from the xserver years ago so most of these drivers are completely unaccelerated.

Even today you find totally unaccelerated display adapters such as the DisplayLink USB devices.

If you want to use the older hardware, use an older distro or one that caters to older hardware.

Old distros often have old kernels, so you can't use modern filesystems, they don't have support for modern peripherals, and often no security support, etc.

You aren't missing out any anything ith the newer software stacks anyway since he older cards can't handle it. Do you really think an S3 virge in a 200 Mhz Pentium Pro can handle gnome shell or kwin, or even xfce?

Who says they need to handle Gnome shell? Driving a laptop panel at its native resolution, or being able to configure an external monitor would be a start.
Lightweight desktop environments like LXDE work fine even on a 15 year old machine with 256 MB RAM.

[agd5f]

Fortunately, and that is the reason for my previous post, is that drivers who are built from the same codebase (such as the Linux kernel, or the old monolithic X) will normally be updated along when an API changes. This prevents those drivers from bitrotting.

They are still probably broken because no one tests them. Sure they may build, but that's about it. It also means things like not running the xserver as root will keep getting pushed forward indefinitly. It also means maintaining tons of crufty old layers in the xserver to support these drivers that are probably also in various stages of decay. Additionally, you can't bang on hw directly from userspace on secureboot enabled systems. Moreover, XAA support was dropped from the xserver years ago so most of these drivers are completely unaccelerated. If you want to use the older hardware, use an older distro or one that caters to older hardware. You aren't missing out any anything ith the newer software stacks anyway since he older cards can't handle it. Do you really think an S3 virge in a 200 Mhz Pentium Pro can handle gnome shell or kwin, or even xfce?

[chithanh]

This is the dark side of not having frozen APIs in Linux. Drivers pretty much have to have maintainers or they gradually fall behind and effectively die.

Fortunately, and that is the reason for my previous post, is that drivers who are built from the same codebase (such as the Linux kernel, or the old monolithic X) will normally be updated along when an API changes. This prevents those drivers from bitrotting.

[curaga]

It's too bad that Kabini has a GCN GPU - that means the currently-worse-quality radeonsi over r600g.

[Kivada]

Makes sense to move hardware like that to using BSD... my tyan thunder 2 atx computer acutally has sound support there! And they are still supporting ancient hardware like acceleration support for SX graphics on SparcStations probably the oldest hardware capable of accelerating compositing -> http://my.opera.com/Macallan/blog/

Like I said, theres Linux distros out there that will keep support for ancient hardware, I actually used to run Damn Small on a 33Mhz 486SX with an ATI Mach64 as an experiment, it ran well enough, till the GPU died and I had to go back to the onboard chip.

The thing is though, why you would expect a distro geared toward modern hardware using apps that are likely far too heavy to run well on it, when you could just grab a specialized low end/old hardware distro.

Really though, unless you are dumpster diving for gear to restore and donate like I do the cost of running such old hardware is outweighed by the power savings of getting a system that draws 15w like an AMD A4-5000 board, it'll be faster at literally everything being a a quad core 64 bit CPU with an OpenGL4/OpenCL1.2 class GPU that already has OSS driver support.

[bridgman]

They are not abandoned, but their pace of development is slow. There were suggestions to integrate these drivers back into the X server like in the old monolithic days, which would maybe be the only long term way to deal with the problem.

I don't think anyone cares about pace of development other than keeping up with (ie continuing to work with) ongoing changes in kernel, X server and mesa.

This is the dark side of not having frozen APIs in Linux. Drivers pretty much have to have maintainers or they gradually fall behind and effectively die.

EDIT -- oh cool, I crossed 7,000 posts recently...