[Mesa-dev] Remove classic drivers or fork src/mesa for gallium?

[Jason Ekstrand]

On Sun, Mar 29, 2020 at 6:06 PM Bas Nieuwenhuizen
<bas at basnieuwenhuizen.nl> wrote:
>
> On Sun, Mar 29, 2020 at 11:36 PM Eric Engestrom <eric at engestrom.ch> wrote:
> >
> >
> >
> > On 2020-03-29 at 20:58, Jason Ekstrand <jason at jlekstrand.net> wrote:
> > > On Sun, Mar 29, 2020 at 11:45 AM Kristian Høgsberg <hoegsberg at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > >
> > > > As for loading, doesn't glvnd solve that?
> > >
> > > Not really.  There are still problems if you have HW drivers from both
> > > repos on the same system and someone has to decide which one to use.
> > > We would either have to come up with a good solution to that problem
> > > or we would have to delete/disable all of the drivers still in master
> > > in the LTS branch.  In any case, there are real problems to solve
> > > there.
> >
> > That's a simple packaging issue, and IMO it's ok to just say in the announcement
> > email "this 'legacy drivers' branch also contains old versions of the new
> > drivers. If you ship both these and a modern version of Mesa, make sure
> > not to build the same drivers from both trees".
> >
> > Packagers will then pick the right `-D{dri,gallium,vulkan}-drivers=` lists
> > to avoid collisions on their distros.
>
> Wouldn't this be much safer anyway with a small patch to remove those
> "new" drivers from the meson options list?

It may not be that simple.  If, for instance, we wanted to cut of Gen7
Vulkan, we would somehow have to provide an option to limit which
hardware generations are supported in the LTS branch.  Either that or
just delete support for Gen8+ somehow.

--Jason