On 05/25/2017 06:45 PM, Timothy Arceri wrote:
Hi all,
Following on from the discussion here:
https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__lists.freedesktop.org_archives_mesa-2Ddev_2017-2DMay_155971.html&d=DwIGaQ&c=uilaK90D4TOVoH58JNXRgQ&r=Ie7_encNUsqxbSRbqbNgofw0ITcfE8JKfaUjIQhncGA&m=gm5GImkP-Ydr8Pd1vhXbWJvFSmS_MUND5KGjOHQpVOU&s=2xNPkqm6U5phLP1RHR5BfKOC5fpPplnj9U1FAZvCuAM&e=
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.
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
Opinions?
I think a key point is what do the distro vendors think/want? That is,
do vendors such as Fedora, Ubuntu, etc. perceive a need to keep
supporting the older GPUs? It would be extra work for them to
build/package/ship ToT Mesa plus drivers from a deprecated driver branch.
This is an instance where I'd love to be able to poll the user community
to see what GPUs people still care about. I don't know if the distro
vendors have such data about their user's hardware.
Though, I have a feeling that if someone's still using i915, r200,
radeon, etc. (and want to use the latest distros) they're not too
concerned about 3D performance and just want reasonable desktop
performance. Would they be happy with llvmpipe?
-Brian
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