[Mesa-dev] Old toys [DRI1 drivers] .....

[randrianasulu at gmail.com]

Ok, it seems very few people want to have them in working state from 
developers side of fence. Corbin simply can't boot them, others are busy with 
new radeon/nouveau/intel.

So, first  I will list drivers, as far as i understand them, please correct:

i810 - Old Intel, 16-bit only rendering, IIRC.
mach64 - used in  at least some notebooks, so hard to upgrade. Has little VRAM 
(4-8mb often), but due to this can benefit from private backbuffers in DRI2.
mga - G200-G450 (?) , has some unique features, like dropping depth 
renderbuffer into AGP space.
r128 - as everyone know, can be folded into radeon ..... 
savage - again, notebook owners still forced to use them.
sis - only small part of SiS video family supported, I remeber kernel part is 
not fun even as-is.
tdfx - usually tied to glide.
unichrome/openchrome - i hope this one will have active devs?

Well, most of drivers listed were written with common template during 
Mesa-4.0-5.0 era, because of this and because they will need total rewrite 
for KMS anyway ... I think i have idea.

Can freedesktop/X.org organise something like Google summer (winter?) of Code, 
with some tasks, need for moving those drivers forward? Good documentation 
about _today_ mesa's internals and interfaces  hopefully will speed up 
process?

Hint: Intel, as  BIG corp, can organise something for i810 :}

Sometimes, i thin gfx/3D programming world is like Unix for windows users, 
friendly but only for some (few). 

But, main idea here ... this is NOT neccesary to make it harder for people who 
want (and can) enter. Most devs played with old, fixed-function chipsets 
10-15 years ago, so now they simply not interested in making same steps 
again.

But i think other people may want  to start from something simple, too. Not 
from latest 200W air heater from ATI/NVIDIA.

And .... as  the last word. I think (bad habit, yes) what  simply removing 
something is not equal to creating even simple driver ... rm is always 
simpler than edit, but "easy ways" lead to easy fails in the future.

There is not so much X/3D  (low-level) programmers, but i fear hw/sw 
complexity is only PART of reason .... Core devs haven't time for teaching 
students (and newcomers in general), but should i note - we all are not 
endless?