[Mesa-dev] [RFC] Concrete proposal to split classic

[Timothy Arceri]

On 6/16/21 1:16 PM, Jason Ekstrand wrote:

> On Tue, Jun 15, 2021 at 8:46 PM Timothy Arceri <tarceri at itsqueeze.com> wrote:
>> On 6/16/21 11:03 AM, Jason Ekstrand wrote:
>>
>> I'm bringing this up via e-mail so it gets a wider audience. Given how will crocus is working at this point, is like to propose we hold off for about three more releases before we drop classic. This next release, 21.2, we'll have crocus as an option with i965 as the default. There will also be a -Dprefer-crocus meson options so distros or individuals can attempt to flip it on. The release after that, 21.3, we'll keep i965 in the tree but have crocus be the default (assuming things are going well.) Some time in 2022, probably after the 22.2 release or so, we'll delete classic.
>>
>> Why wait so long? Well, it just landed and we don't have a Cherryview story yet so I'm hesitant to make it the default too quickly. Even if it were the default in 21.2, it's already too late, likely, to hit the fall 2021 distro release cycle. If we flip it to the default before the end of the year, that'll get crocus into spring distros. This is good because 22.04 is an Ubuntu LTS release and I think they'd rather bump crocus versions to fix bugs than backport on top of i965. But that's really fort Ubuntu to decide. In any case, we won't see broad-spread usage and the flood of bug reports until next spring so we may want to wait until then to stay deleting code.
>>
>> If we wanted to accelerate things, one option, once we're ready, would be to ask the person who manages the oibaf PPA to switch to crocus early. That may get some early adopters on board.
>>
>> Thoughts?
>>
>> I though the idea was to put everything in a classic branch and let distros run "classic" hardware from that. What happens after 3 releases does i965 still go to the classic branch with the other classic drivers? If so is it really worth waiting just because Ubuntu might have to back-port a bug fix?
> Yeah, that was the idea.  However, with crocus in good shape and Emma
> Anholt working on i915g, it may be that the actual answer is we just
> throw away the classic drivers and the only thing you really need the
> old branch for is r200 and ancient nouveau.
Fair enough. I don't really have any stake in these drivers, but I am 
eager to get to work on clean ups once we drop the classic drivers. I 
would be disappointed if we were forced to wait another year just to 
have the Intel drivers kept in the classic branch anyway. Going on past 
experience we can pretty much guarantee that someone will at least ask 
we keep them. Anyway up to you guys I guess.