[Mesa-dev] Proposal to branch off old drivers

[Nicolai Hähnle]

On 26.05.2017 03:05, Rob Clark wrote:
> On Thu, May 25, 2017 at 8:45 PM, Timothy Arceri <tarceri at itsqueeze.com> wrote:
>>
>> My specific proposal is:
>>
>> - Rather than just pointing distros at the last Mesa release as we did for
>> the DRI1 driver, we create a mesa-pre-dx9-1.0 branch (branched from 17.1).
>> However unlikely this will at least give us the possibility to release
>> updates as some dev's have shown interest in.
>>
>> - Remove the following drivers from master:
>>     Classic:
>>     --------
>>     i915, nouveau, r200, radeon, swrast (classic)
>>
>>     Gallium:
>>     --------
>>     r300, i915g
>>
>> Opinions?
> 
> The arguments about not breaking old/stable drivers that aren't
> getting much testing on mesa/master is valid..
> 
> I'm not sure I would call it "pre-dx9".. part of that might be not
> being sure what dx feature level maps to in opengl(es).. on the mobile
> side, we have some newer hw and drivers that see a lot of development
> which could only support gl2/gles2, and I wouldn't want to cut those
> off.  Especially when they might share a lot of code w/ drivers for
> newer hw which could support gl3/gles3+.. ie. etnaviv/freedreno (and
> maybe someday vc4?).
> 
> Otoh if we can count on libglvnd to be a stable API so distros could
> let drivers from legacy tree/branch easily coexist w/ drivers from a
> master branch.. that might be a win-win.

Note glvnd doesn't currently cover everything, e.g. libgbm. On the other 
hand, we can keep the DRI interface stable, so it's not an issue.

Cheers,
Nicolai


> The downsides are porting
> changes related to dependencies (I guess most of what we can drop
> doesn't care about llvm version, so the dependencies are not much?),
> new gcc versions (I guess mostly solved by compiler flags in distro
> packaging?), and CVEs (I guess not much?).  The upside is drivers for
> old hw doesn't get repeatedly broken by refactoring and new features
> that can't easily be tested on old hw.  The rest is just sorting out
> which side of those choices out-weighs the other.
> 
> BR,
> -R
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