[PATCH 2/2] drm: make DRI1 drivers depend on BROKEN

[Kevin Brace]

Hi Connor,

> > r128 is 90% the same as early radeons so it would make sense to add
> > support to radeon.
> >
> > Alex
> 
> Ccing Kevin Brace.
> 
> The drivers were removed from mesa and "you won't have to freeze your
> kernel or anything" was one of the justifications given at the time for
> why this wasn't a bad idea. So yes, I have dri1 packages in the
> Archlinux repos with no plans to drop them. The people who have emailed
> me about them and filed bugs are probably much less than 1% of the user
> base but I've never considered that relevant. The point is that
> hobbyists who want to use old hardware or play with seldomly updated
> drivers should be able to do this without too many additional hurdles.
> 
> AFAIK the drivers still work as well as they did in the late 90s. And
> it's easy for security conscious people to not modprobe them. My -1
> would probably mean more if I were still following my initial plans of
> adding r128 support to the radeon kernel module but at some point while
> reading documentation I lost motivation. Hopefully this is temporary.
> 
> 
> 

I should not make any mockery of people's sincere beliefs, but at this point as a non-corporate graphics stack developer (of course, I have worked only on DDX so far), I am starting to see the perspectives of those who are anti-consumerism a little bit.
Every year around Black Friday (For those who are not too familiar with US customs and holidays, Thanksgiving is one of the major holiday here, but more importantly for retailers and computer hardware corporations, Black Friday is really the biggest event of the year where silicon-based products assembled in China as circuit boards moves in huge numbers, hence, they get to keep engineers, marketers, and CEOs employed.) there are people who preach anti-consumerism against the huge Black Friday tide.
Of course, based on what I see around the parking lot of Fry's Electronics (a major US based electronics retailer HQed here in San Jose, CA, USA) on Black Friday, I do not think they are winning the conversion war (I am not religious, but it is sort of a pseudo-religion, similar to "some" evangelical Protestant Christians or Mormons who do street evangelism from time to time, but do not appear to convert too many people.), but sometimes when I see the still usable computer hardware being tossed out at the so called "e-waste" site, I always wonder if there is a good way to give second or even third life to the soon to be crushed computer hardware still fairly useful for ordinary (i.e., non-gamer) use.
Anyway, I started collecting probably too much abandoned computer hardware, and I have to joking call it "I built a computer parts empire" where I live since I own so much computer equipment, probably more than I really need.
I will like to give second and third life to the hardware I have collected over the past 6 years, and ultimately, this is how I ended up working on OpenChrome as a result.
    Since I am starting to show sympathy towards anti-consumerism people and views (I am still not totally sold on it, but starting to understand where they are coming from.) I sort of have to wonder about the motivations of many of the corporate "paid" OSS developers, especially the device driver developer types.
I know security issues do matter, but in some ways, rapid obsolescence thing I am sure comes into play.
Corporations like Intel and AMD (and many others involved in OSS) have to keep selling silicon based products to keep their engineers (and marketers and CEOs) employed, and it is not too nice financially to them if people keep clinging onto their dated hardware (like clinging onto a gun and religion as one politician once said privately, but it was supposedly a taboo subject in portions of the country, hence, it became a big story prior to an election) due to some guy like myself or Connor Behan continues to somehow churn out code that makes the dated hardware a little more useful.
    As a developer of OpenChrome, I am getting into this ad hoc alliance of convenience (That's the way I see it. I hope Connor gets my humor.) with Connor Behan of xf86-video-r128.
In fact, it was Connor that CCed me the reply he sent to this mailing list, and this is why I am even writing this post.
Like Connor, I will not want to see VIA DRI1 module removed from the Linux kernel for now, but since this is a mere ad hoc alliance of convenience, I am okay with dropping or demoting DRI1 support as long as some other more experienced OSS developers can assist in developing drm-openchrome and EXA acceleration support for DRI2 inside OpenChrome DDX since a lot of the drm-openchrome has been written already.
I probably already offended too many people in this post (i.e., anti-consumerism people, religious people, gun owners, people who were offended by the "guns and religon" comment, engineers who work at silicon vendors like Intel, AMD, etc, and maybe even Connor Behan.), I will keep it there.
But I am sure some people enjoyed my essay here.

Regards,

Kevin Brace 

P.S. I will not be surprised if I am blacklisted at various silicon vendors for showing sympathy towards anti-consumerism.