Impending X driver deprecation

Adam Jackson ajackson at redhat.com
Wed Jan 9 19:29:29 UTC 2008


I'm grinding through porting the various X drivers to the new server
APIs, and I'm taking the opportunity to clean house a bit.  Here's what
I'm planning:

The avivo driver is going away, it's a dead end upstream, both the
radeon-atombios and radeonhd projects look significantly more viable.  I
don't have a plan yet for which one to enable for F9 though.

The vga driver is going away.  It hasn't been installed by default since
F7, and no one seems to have noticed, let alone complained.  It's not a
usable driver anyway, it can't do greater than 8bpp and Gnome won't even
launch on that anymore.

The ark, chips, s3, and tseng drivers are going away.  These are all
really boring early PCI chipsets that don't even have a 3d engine.  They
should be adequately serviced by the vesa driver.  (Note that there are
three drivers for the various S3 cards: s3, s3virge, and savage.  s3 is
for the old pre-Virge chips, 968 and Trio and friends.  s3virge and
savage are not being dropped.)

The vesa driver will be updated to Obsolete these drivers (except avivo)
and sufficient magic will happen to get anyone still using them silently
moved onto vesa.  Whichever of radeon or radeonhd we end up using for
R500+ chips will Obsolete avivo.

If you object to any part of this plan, speak loudly, now.

- ajax




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