[Mesa-dev] DEATH to old drivers!

[Dee Sharpe]

On 8/24/2011 2:11 PM, Ian Romanick wrote:
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> I'd like to propose giving the ax to a bunch of old, unmaintained
> drivers.  I've been doing a bunch of refactoring and reworking of core
> Mesa code, and these drivers have been causing me problems for a number
> of reasons.
>
> 1. The hardware is so old that it doesn't support a lot of features that
> have been common for 12+ years.
>
> 2. The drivers are so unmaintained that even hacking in new features
> with dummy implementations is painful.
>
> 3. The drivers are so buggy that many piglit tests hang the GPU.  I
> tried doing a piglit run on a Rage128 Pro that I have, but I gave up
> after having to blacklist 15 tests.
>
> It also seems that at least some distros (e.g., Fedora) have stopped
> shipping non-DRI2 drivers.  If nobody is shipping it, nobody is using it.
>
> My specific proposal is:
>
>   - Remove all DRI1 drivers: i810, mach64, mga, r128, savage, sis, tdfx,
> and unichrome.
>
>   - Remove all unmaintained Windows drivers: gldirect, icd.
>
>   - Remove beos.
>
>   - Remove fbdev (this is swrast on raw fbdev).
>
> Opinions?

Rather than completely getting rid of these drivers, can they just be 
moved to an archived branch with a side note in one of the README files 
or something? Many of these drivers give examples of how these systems 
interfaced with Mesa3d back when they still worked. They'd serve as a 
great starting point for implementers who'd like to bring those 
platforms back up to speed with the rest of the platforms that run Mesa3d.

-- 

Dee Sharpe

The difference between what IS done
&  what COULD be done is relational to
what you ARE doing&  what you COULD be doing!