Fedora 37 Considering Removal Of Legacy X.Org Drivers

Adding to the interesting changes being worked on for Fedora 37 due out later this year is the removal of legacy X.Org drivers. Fedora is looking at removing the legacy graphics driver paths that are incompatible with running Wayland.

A change proposal laid out this week by Red Hat's Adam Jackson is for removing the VESA and FBDEV X.Org drivers and in turn associated support code from the X.Org Server that leads to using those drivers. This is part of transitioning further away from X11 and focusing on Wayland support. The FBDEV/VESA X.Org driver code isn't well maintained and largely used by obsolete graphics cards that lack hardware acceleration anyhow.

Ajax explained in the F37 change proposal, "Both of these drivers are somewhat deprecated upstream, and the code to reach them is increasingly fragile as it gets exercised less and less. This change will identify the remaining configurations that can reach these drivers, establish an alternative for display support for each configuration, and then remove the drivers and their support code in xserver."

The plan for removing these legacy X11 driver code paths is laid out via the Fedora Wiki. On the Fedora mailing list so far are some concerns raised about phasing out the FBDEV/VESA X.Org driver support but more than likely will go through as part of Fedora's ongoing focus of transitioning more to Wayland and phasing out older/obsolete hardware support.

Fedora continues work on phasing out obsolete hardware support to focus their resources on best handling newer hardware.

Fedora 37 is also the release where they are eyeing the deprecation of legacy BIOS support, stop building unused i686 packages and retiring Armv7 support. Fedora 37 should be out in October.