[Mesa-dev] DEATH to old drivers!

Jose Fonseca jfonseca at vmware.com
Wed Aug 24 15:25:50 PDT 2011



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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?

Sounds good to me FWIW. If anybody feels they want to support any of these, they can make a branch/fork later.

Jose


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