Fedora 21 Will Try To Abandon Non-KMS GPU Drivers

[chithanh]

Upgrade your shit or use another distro. Don't be like the ignorant IE6 user who wants his crap to be supported by mainstream as long as he uses it.

Why abandon perfectly functioning hardware? That's what computer users have done all the years when new Windows versions were released and required new drivers, which old hardware would rarely get.

So it's less a case of abandoning these drivers, and more an acknowledgement that they were abandoned years ago?

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.

[intellivision]

Upgrade your shit or use another distro. Don't be like the ignorant IE6 user who wants his crap to be supported by mainstream as long as he uses it.

Are you a maintainer of Fedora?
If not, your opinion doesn't matter. No one has to upgrade their hardware just because you say they have to.
Also, I recall Fedora has a LXDE spin for older machines so it's not as if they're not supporting those users.

[smitty3268]

you don't need KMS support for Wayland you only need it for Weston

You only need it for hardware accelerated OSS drivers in Weston. Weston/Wayland has a software rendering backend (instead of using GL) which would likely be more appropriate for this hardware anyway, and it won't require KMS.

[mark45]

Can't say I like this - I was using r128 cards until earlier this year, so it seems likely that there are still users of them. i810 and Geode also seem a bit odd to me as hardware to abandon support for.

Upgrade your shit or use another distro. Don't be like the ignorant IE6 user who wants his crap to be supported by mainstream as long as he uses it.

Is there some maintenance or performance advantage to having only KMS drivers beyond that of abandoning individual ones?

Take a wild guess Sherlock.

[LinuxGamer]

why UMS for vesa? can they run off KMS too. im saying this because Wayland needs KMS.

you don't need KMS support for Wayland you only need it for Weston

[cb88]

Yep. While it sucks, there is also nobody stepping up and porting these drivers to KMS either. The plan has basically been let the pre-OpenGL2 class hardware support die off since it's so old.

But there will always be distros that cater to the ancient hardware.

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/

[dante]

Phoronix: Fedora 21 Will Try To Abandon Non-KMS GPU Drivers

There's hope that Fedora 21 will do away with non-KMS graphics drivers by default. A whole set of conventional (UMS) X.Org drivers are set to be retired in this first Fedora Linux release of 2014...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTQ0Njc

In few words , Fedora is trying to be buggy as possible

[Kivada]

So it's less a case of abandoning these drivers, and more an acknowledgement that they were abandoned years ago?

Yep. While it sucks, there is also nobody stepping up and porting these drivers to KMS either. The plan has basically been let the pre-OpenGL2 class hardware support die off since it's so old.

But there will always be distros that cater to the ancient hardware.

[Delgarde]

The problem with these drivers is often that they stop building when major changes are made to the X server. Sometimes they remain broken for quite some time until a fix is applied, and even longer until a new release with the fix is made. It is quite understandable that there is a lack of time or motivation to hunt down patches or package git snapshots.

So it's less a case of abandoning these drivers, and more an acknowledgement that they were abandoned years ago?

[chithanh]

The problem with these drivers is often that they stop building when major changes are made to the X server. Sometimes they remain broken for quite some time until a fix is applied, and even longer until a new release with the fix is made. It is quite understandable that there is a lack of time or motivation to hunt down patches or package git snapshots.

Who would suffer most from dropping the UMS drivers are laptop users with these chipsets, because the VESA driver may not be able to drive the laptop display at native resolution or support configuration of an external VGA output.