Fedora 21 Still Aims To Get Rid Of Lots Of Old GPU Drivers

Fedora 21 when released late in 2014 will effectively retire support for a lot of old graphics card drivers.

Going back to last year have been plans to drop support for really old GPUs from Fedora 21. It's been a few months since then and these really old X.Org drivers are still set to be slaughtered from the Fedora repository.

Among the drivers set to be removed from Fedora 21 for the X.Org DDX drivers are APM, Cirrus, Glint, i128, i740, Mach64, MGA, Neomagic, R128, Rendition, S3virge, Savage, SiliconMotion, SiS, Tdfx, and Trident. These are basically the drivers for really old graphics processors that's no longer widespread in use. Users of affected hardware could still manually compile the X.Org DDX drivers if they wish, but your best bet with such obsolete hardware would be sticking to older Linux distribution releases. The latest Git code for these drivers tend to rarely see new commits upstream and are effectively deprecated besides rarely seeing testing.

Gutting out these older X.Org drivers is also part of the effort to remove non-KMS graphics drivers from Fedora Linux. With Fedora 21 moving towards Wayland and other parts of the Linux desktop stack becoming dependent upon modern graphics driver capabilities, it's a good time as ever to drop this old support. For DRM/KMS graphics drivers in Fedora 21, the X.Org Server will be able to run without root privileges.

Other packages set for retirement in Fedora 21 can be found via this mailing list post.