[Mesa-dev] DEATH to old drivers!

[Keith Whitwell]

On Wed, 2011-08-24 at 20:46 -0400, Kristian Høgsberg wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 24, 2011 at 3:11 PM, Ian Romanick <idr at freedesktop.org> 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?
> 
> 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.

I will though:  Me too!

Keith