[Mesa-dev] Proposal to branch off old drivers

[Rob Clark]

On Fri, May 26, 2017 at 6:27 PM, Timothy Arceri <tarceri at itsqueeze.com> wrote:
>
>
> On 27/05/17 08:11, Rob Clark wrote:
>>
>> On Fri, May 26, 2017 at 10:16 AM, Brian Paul <brianp at vmware.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> I think a key point is what do the distro vendors think/want?  That is,
>>> do
>>> vendors such as Fedora, Ubuntu, etc. perceive a need to keep supporting
>>> the
>>> older GPUs?  It would be extra work for them to build/package/ship ToT
>>> Mesa
>>> plus drivers from a deprecated driver branch.
>>
>>
>> I guess the "one extra package to build" is probably greatly offset by
>> the "not having to debug broken old hw because of new mesa features"
>> aspect.. although in practice I don't end up doing much of either.
>>
>> I'm much less excited about the "drop pre-dx9 parts of
>> gallium+mesa/st" part of the idea, since that is needed by a bunch of
>> the smaller arm gpus that are seeing active development.  But if
>> libglvnd let us partition things so we never/rarely had to touch the
>> legacy tree, and it therefore reduced the risk of breakage for someone
>> with old hw upgrading to newer distro to get security fixes or
>> unrelated new features, that seems pretty useful.
>
>
> It seems removing the Gallium drivers would be more trouble than its worth.
> On the classic side unless everything but i965 is dropped I don't see much
> point of branching the other driver off.

hmm, well, between the perf improvements Marek has been making on the
mesa/st + gallium side of things (re: his comments about radeonsi now
having 6x less draw overhead than i965), plus the work to split out
common code re-used between i965 and anv (and hypothetically some sort
of future i965g gallium driver), maybe splitting out the other classic
drivers now could mean that some years down the road the road we end
up with no more classic drivers ;-)

BR,
-R