time for amber2 branch?

[Gert Wollny]

On Wed, 2024-06-19 at 10:33 -0400, Mike Blumenkrantz wrote:
> In looking at the gallium tree, I'm wondering if it isn't time for a
> second amber branch to prune some of the drivers that cause pain when
> doing big tree updates:

virgl is actively maintained and covered by the CI. Apart from the
burden of NTT and, hence TGSI code, I don't think that it carries that
much baggage the we shouldn't be able to address problems that may
arise from tree-wide changes.

As for r600, I'm in principle not against moving it to an amber2
branch, because I got burned by changes gallium one time to many to
really defend keeping it in the main tree.

I see that Triang3l wouldn't be too happy about it, because this would
mean that Terakan would either have to target this amber2 branch,
improvements to the common Vulkan code would not be picked up and would
need back-porting, or we would have to duplicate the maintenance of the
r600 shader compiler code in amber2 and main.

rusticl would be a similar thing, but ATM I don't have anything to say
about how this may go forward for r600 anyway. 

If someone were to add a pre-merge CI for r600 hardware then I would be
strongly in favor of keeping r600 in main - possibly dropping support
for pre-Evergreen cards there and keeping that only in amber2, but
without a CI I only see more pain coming up if we keep r600 in main.

I don't have an opinion regarding the other drivers. 

Best, 
Gert