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

Jason Ekstrand jason at jlekstrand.net
Tue Mar 23 00:41:29 UTC 2021


+1. I'd we think GLVND and X are ready for this, I think it's a good plan.

On March 22, 2021 17:34:09 Eric Anholt <eric at anholt.net> wrote:

> On Mon, Mar 22, 2021 at 3:27 PM Dylan Baker <dylan at pnwbakers.com> wrote:
>>
>> Hi list,
>>
>> We've talked about it a number of times, but I think it's time time to
>> discuss splitting the classic drivers off of the main development branch
>> again, although this time I have a concrete plan for how this would
>> work.
>>
>> First, why? Basically, all of the classic drivers are in maintanence
>> mode (even i965). Second, many of them rely on code that no one works
>> on, and very few people still understand. There is no CI for most of
>> them, and the Intel CI is not integrated with gitlab, so it's easy to
>> unintentionally break them, and this breakage usually isn't noticed
>> until just before or just after a release. 21.0 was held up (in small
>> part, also me just getting behind) because of such breakages.
>>
>> I konw there is some interest in getting i915g in good enough shape that
>> it could replace i915c, at least for the common case. I also am aware
>> that Dave, Ilia, and Eric (with some pointers from Ken) have been
>> working on a gallium driver to replace i965. Neither of those things are
>> ready yet, but I've taken them into account.
>>
>> Here's the plan:
>>
>> 1) 21.1 release happens
>> 2) we remove classic from master
>> 3) 21.1 reaches EOL because of 21.2
>> 4) we fork the 21.1 branch into a "classic-lts"¹ branch
>> 5) we disable all vulkan and gallium drivers in said branch, at least at
>> the Meson level
>> 6) We change the name and precidence of the glvnd loader file
>> 7) apply any build fixups (turn of intel generators for versions >= 7.5,
>> for example
>> 8) maintain that branch with build and critical bug fixes only
>
> I would like it if Intel could avoid garbage-collecting older-HW
> shared code for at least a release due aforementioned WIPs, but I
> think it's time to call the classic i965_dri.so and i915_dri.so done.

I'm happy to leave older hardware support in the tree for now. We need to 
keep the vec4 compiler for HSW Vulkan support for now and there's no harm 
in keeping old hardware support in ISL. I'm a little tempted to let HSW 
Vulkan bitrot in the LTS branch too but it does still pick up features here 
and there so I'm unsure if that's a good idea or not.

--Jason


> +1 from me assuming that we validate that one can actually get a
> working X server with the mesa-legacy set installed.
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