Video support for old hardware going away

[GreyGeek]

Phonorix posted an article about the news that Mesa/Xorg are dropping support for a list of vintage video chips:

The drivers/hardware that no longer have mainline Mesa driver support are listed below.

i810: Early Intel 8xx series IGPs
Mach64: ATI Mach GPUs
MGA: Matrox GPUs
r128: ATI Rage 128 GPUs like the Rage Fury, XPERT 99, and XPERT 128
Savage: S3 Savage GPUs
SiS: Crusty SiS GPUs
Tdfx: 3dfx Voodoo graphics cards
Unichrome: VIA IGPs (Well, the ones where there was actually support available.)

Dropping the DRI1 drivers listed above eliminated over 85,000 lines of code from the Mesa tree. Code that was mostly unmaintained and didn't receive new feature support work in years.

You can check to see if your installation is using the Intel i810 driver by opening a Konsole and issuing:

lsmod | grep i81

Ditto for the
r128
s3fb
savagefb
sisfb
and others...

The i810 driver, for example, supports the following chipsets:
i810, i810-DC100, i810e, i815, i830M, 845G, 852GM, 855GM, 865G, 915G, 915GM, 945G, 945GM, 965G, 965Q and 946GZ.

If lspci or lshw lists your video chips as one of these, then its days are numbered.

Lot's of old hardware will be landing in dustbins around the world after the next Xorg upgrade.

[vinnywright]

Re: Video support for old hardware going away

I have a few of those

VINNY

[Snowhog]

Re: Video support for old hardware going away

Just pin your current xorg video driver so it won't be upgraded.

[vinnywright]

Re: Video support for old hardware going away

Just pin your current xorg video driver so it won't be upgraded.

I will do that now on the one box that is still hooked up that is in queshton.

Humm may half to put a sticky note on the case of the one that is not hooked up.

VINNY

[SteveRiley]

Re: Video support for old hardware going away

The i810 driver, for example, supports the following chipsets:
i810, i810-DC100, i810e, i815, i830M, 845G, 852GM, 855GM, 865G, 915G, 915GM, 945G, 945GM, 965G, 965Q and 946GZ.

Maybe not this entire list? My netbook has a 945GM and the driver is i915, so it looks like I'm still good for at least a little while longer...

[ardvark71]

Re: Video support for old hardware going away

Hi all...

For the benefit of the older systems that are still useful and can be converted over to Linux, these drivers should be kept.

Regards...