On 26/05/17 10:45, Timothy Arceri wrote:
Hi all,
Following on from the discussion here:
https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/mesa-dev/2017-May/155971.html
Back in 2011/12 despite various concerns old hardware would become
useless, dropping support for DRI1 drivers Mesa proved distros were up
to the challenge of packaging up the old driver branch, and since we
maintain compatibility they continue to work without issue.
I'm currently working on uniform packing for gallium drivers which means
updates to struct gl_program_parameter_list and the assumption that
everything is padded to 4 vectors. Rather than updating and testing i915
to work with this (or even hacking around it), I'd rather make the
proposal to branch off some older drivers.
Why branch them off?
1. IMO there is a bunch of clean-up this would enable such as:
- enabling a bunch of extensions by default and removing on the runtime
checks for these pasted all over the api.
- dropping a bunch of non asm mesa ir code paths
- dropping a bunch of driver function callbacks
- the software tnl code??
- Likely a bunch of other bits and pieces.
2. They are either not in development at all, or being updated extremely
rarely. Testing is often just does this code compile. Having them in
master just opens them to the possibility of breakage.
3. Death by a thousand cuts. While the clean-ups above may not be huge I
would argue a more important outcome is the ability to preform
re-factors, add features, etc without needlessly updating these drivers.
As someone who re-factored the main gl_* structs last year in the lead
up to shader cache support, I can say my job would have been much easier
if I didn't have to needlessly update the old classic drivers.
On the gallium side there is are things like adding caps to all the
drivers etc, again not huge but another cut.
4. As the API expands it just adds more overhead for features these
drivers will mostly never support. The drivers likely already run on
systems with much slower cpus.
A point from the dri1 proposal:
5. The hardware is so old that it doesn't support a lot of features that
have been common for 13 years (OpenGL 2.0).
Note: That some of the later hardware supported by (r300, NV30) does
include OpenGL 2.{0,1}.
My specific proposal is:
- Rather than just pointing distros at the last Mesa release as we did
for the DRI1 driver, we create a mesa-pre-dx9-1.0 branch (branched from
17.1). However unlikely this will at least give us the possibility to
release updates as some dev's have shown interest in.
- Remove the following drivers from master:
Classic:
--------
i915, nouveau, r200, radeon, swrast (classic) >
Gallium:
--------
r300, i915g
Forgot NV30 here.
Opinions?
_______________________________________________
mesa-dev mailing list
mesa-dev@lists.freedesktop.org
https://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/mesa-dev
_______________________________________________
mesa-dev mailing list
mesa-dev@lists.freedesktop.org
https://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/mesa-dev
