[Mesa-dev] [RFC] Deprecating old DRI loaders/drivers

[Emil Velikov]

On 17 May 2017 at 05:04, Jason Ekstrand <jason at jlekstrand.net> wrote:

> If we are genuinely making things more maintainable, then maybe deprecation
> is reasonable.  However, of it's just churn, then it may just be a source of
> new bugs to fix.  I think asking "why?" is perfectly reasonable.
>
Seems like I failed to state it clearly:
The new code added is a few warning messages. Those in itself will
flag up any existing bugs that we have failed to catch.
Followed by some period X, those will be removed alongside the unused code.

> On the other side, perhaps we should consider instead taking advantage of
> the backwards comparability and dropping some of the old and unmaintained
> drivers from the tree, put them on a critical-bugfix-only branch, and
> recommend that distros build two mesas and only install the loader from the
> newer one.  Dropping i915, r200, and other effectively unmaintained drivers
> from the tree would make it much easier to do core state tracker cleanups
> since there would effectively only be two state trackers: gallium and i915.
> For example, there's a lot of code floating around for dealing with hardware
> that doesn't have native integers.
>
FWIW I have patches for i915 and nouveau_vieux which add support for
DRI2_FLUSH v4 and others.

I tend to agree with your idea here, although it's somewhat orthogonal
to what I'm suggesting.
Can we move that to its own thread?

Thanks
Emil