[Mesa-dev] DEATH to old drivers!

[Alex Deucher]

On Wed, Aug 24, 2011 at 3:37 PM, Dee Sharpe
<demetrioussharpe at netscape.net> wrote:
> On 8/24/2011 2:11 PM, Ian Romanick wrote:
>>
>> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
>> Hash: SHA1
>>
>> 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.
>

You can see them in the git history and the old release tags and
branches.  That should cover it.

Alex