time for amber2 branch?

[Ian Romanick]

On 6/20/24 7:20 AM, Erik Faye-Lund wrote:
> 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:
>>
>> * nv30
>> * r300
>> * r600
>> * lima
>> * virgl
>> * tegra
>> * ???
>>
>> There's nothing stopping these drivers from continuing to develop in
>> an amber branch, but the risk of them being broken by other tree
>> refactorings is lowered, and then we are able to delete lots of
>> legacy code in the main branch.
>>
>> Thoughts?
> 
> When we did Amber, we had a lot better reason to do so than "these
> drivers cause pain when doing big tree updates". The maintenance burden
> imposed by the drivers proposed for removal here is much, much smaller,
> and doesn't really let us massively clean up things in a way comparable
> to last time.

I was going to say basically the same thing.

> I'm not convinced that this is a good idea. Most (if not all) of these
> drivers are still useful, and several of them are actively maintained.
> Pulling them out of main makes very little sense to me.
> 
> What exactly are you hoping to gain from this? If it's just that
> they're old hardware with less capabilities, perhaps we can address the
> problems from that in a different way, by (for instance) introducing a
> "legacy hw" gallium layer, so legacy HW details doesn't have to leak
> out into the rest of gallium...