Mesa Developers Consider Branching Off Some Older GPU Drivers - Including AMD R300/R600
([Mesa] 6 Hours Ago
Mesa Amber2)
- Reference: 0001631102
- News link: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Mesa-Considering-Amber-2
- Source link:
Mike Blumenkrantz of Valve's Linux graphics team has ignited a discussion over potentially shifting some of Mesa's older GPU drivers into a new legacy Git branch in order to better support the more modern OpenGL and Vulkan drivers without having to worry about breaking the legacy drivers and to allow for better cleaning of the Mesa codebase. Among the drivers that could be impacted are the ATI/AMD R300 and R600 drivers and many smaller drivers.
Back in 2021 various old Mesa "classic" non-Gallium3D drivers were [1]punted off into a Mesa "Amber" branch to ease Mesa development burdens. Back in 2021 that shift to the Mesa Amber branch included Radeon R100/R200 drivers, the original Nouveau code, the Intel i915 and i965 classic drivers, and others.
Now we have a discussion over potentially creating an "Amber2" branch to effectively retire more of the older drivers that are rarely seeing any new development activity but complicating modern Mesa development efforts when it comes to cleaning up the codebase, addressing continuous integration (CI) breakage on the older platforms, and similar constraints.
Mike Blumenkrantz was motivated to start this Amber2 discussion given the less-maintained drivers more frequently hitting CI issues these days and causing pain points. Among the drivers proposed for splitting off into this new legacy Git branch include virgl / svga / i915g / lima / r300 / r600 / nv30 / nv50 and potentially others. For instance, some have suggested even moving the Nouveau NVC0 off to this branch with Zink + NVK being viewed as the future there with NVC0 being hardly maintained.
[2]
The biggest point of contention may be the Radeon R600g driver for moving to Amber2. There are a few hobbyist developers still working on code there and the like as well as users.
This new discussion also raised the matter of whether Mesa's original "Amber" branch was a failure or not. Mesa's Amber branch hasn't seen any activity since January 2023, or less than one year after the code was ultimately branched. No Mesa Amber releases were cut either since 2022. And the Mesa Amber packages aren't widely available by Linux distributions. At the same time that frozen state has ensured those drivers don't inadvertently break with newer Mesa changes but it also shows that there is limited interest/resources in advancing those older drivers given the lack of activity.
No decisions have been made yet but some Mesa developers are clearly interested in at least branching off some of the drivers rarely seeing any modern code activity. Those interested can find the discussion underway on the [3]FreeDesktop.org GitLab .
[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Mesa-Classic-Retired
[2] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=2026&image=old_gpus_lrg
[3] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/work_items/15365
Back in 2021 various old Mesa "classic" non-Gallium3D drivers were [1]punted off into a Mesa "Amber" branch to ease Mesa development burdens. Back in 2021 that shift to the Mesa Amber branch included Radeon R100/R200 drivers, the original Nouveau code, the Intel i915 and i965 classic drivers, and others.
Now we have a discussion over potentially creating an "Amber2" branch to effectively retire more of the older drivers that are rarely seeing any new development activity but complicating modern Mesa development efforts when it comes to cleaning up the codebase, addressing continuous integration (CI) breakage on the older platforms, and similar constraints.
Mike Blumenkrantz was motivated to start this Amber2 discussion given the less-maintained drivers more frequently hitting CI issues these days and causing pain points. Among the drivers proposed for splitting off into this new legacy Git branch include virgl / svga / i915g / lima / r300 / r600 / nv30 / nv50 and potentially others. For instance, some have suggested even moving the Nouveau NVC0 off to this branch with Zink + NVK being viewed as the future there with NVC0 being hardly maintained.
[2]
The biggest point of contention may be the Radeon R600g driver for moving to Amber2. There are a few hobbyist developers still working on code there and the like as well as users.
This new discussion also raised the matter of whether Mesa's original "Amber" branch was a failure or not. Mesa's Amber branch hasn't seen any activity since January 2023, or less than one year after the code was ultimately branched. No Mesa Amber releases were cut either since 2022. And the Mesa Amber packages aren't widely available by Linux distributions. At the same time that frozen state has ensured those drivers don't inadvertently break with newer Mesa changes but it also shows that there is limited interest/resources in advancing those older drivers given the lack of activity.
No decisions have been made yet but some Mesa developers are clearly interested in at least branching off some of the drivers rarely seeing any modern code activity. Those interested can find the discussion underway on the [3]FreeDesktop.org GitLab .
[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Mesa-Classic-Retired
[2] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=2026&image=old_gpus_lrg
[3] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/work_items/15365