[Mesa-dev] DEATH to old drivers!

[Kristian Høgsberg]

On Wed, Aug 24, 2011 at 3:11 PM, Ian Romanick <idr at freedesktop.org> 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?

I wasn't going to chime in with another "me too", but just make it
clear that there's a pretty strong concensus, here we go: yes please!
And I've done a good deal of work in the DRI interface area and the
maintenence burden is real, no matter what the back seat drivers say.

Kristian