A Revived Linux Driver To Be Attempted For The ATI RAGE 128

The ATI Rage 128 series was introduced in 1998 while now twenty years later a renewed DDX driver and potentially DRM/KMS kernel driver is going to be attempted for these AGP/PCI graphics cards from the days of OpenGL 1.2.

The ATI RAGE 128 family was great back in 1998 when it was going up against the Voodoo 3 and RIVA TNT while now for those Linux users who are fans of vintage hardware, there's going to be a renewed driver push. That's hardware back from the days when GPUs could have less than 10 million transistors, were manufactured on a 250nm process, and just over 100MHz clock speeds with SDR memory.

Kevin Brace who dived into open-source Linux graphics drivers two years ago while being the sole remaining developer working on the OpenChrome DRM/KMS driver has decided to take up work on the RAGE 128 graphics stack.

Recently he talked about taking a break from VIA graphics driver work to focusing upon a reusable DRM driver that could be used by other under-served/vintage/old graphics hardware. Today he announced his plans to work on the ATI RAGE 128 driver support.

At this stage he has just begun looking at the DDX user-space X.Org driver for "R128" and posted some basic patches so far. Details on his initial thoughts about RAGE 128 development via this blog post.

He also followed up with another post highlighting the existing issues with RAGE 128 open-source driver support in 2018.