rfc/headsup: graphics driver packaging in F16+

[John Reiser]

On 04/12/2011 09:12 AM, Adam Jackson wrote:
> There are two major package classes in Fedora that provide graphics
> drivers: xorg-x11-drv-*, and mesa-dri-drivers-*.
> 
> In F15, mesa-dri-drivers now only includes drivers with DRI2 support
> (radeon, nvidia, intel) and the software renderer; if you want all the
> older drivers you have to install mesa-dri-drivers-dri1.  This list is:
> 
>     i810, mga, r128, savage, sis, tdfx, unichrome
> 
> Basically all of this hardware is, ahem, inept.  The most featureful
> device supported by these drivers would be the MGA G550, which just
> barely manages to do DirectX 7 (comparable to a Radeon 7000 or GeForce
> 2, both ~1999 vintage).  All the others are back in the DX6 stone age.

My r128 card (Rage Mobility M3 AGP 2X; pci 1002:4c46) is running
DirectX 9.0c (4.09.0000.0904) on Windows ME.  The main driver ATI2DRAI.DRV
says "DDI Version 7".  The machine also runs Fedora 12 using:
   xorg-x11-server-Xorg.1.7.6-4.fc12.i686
   xorg-x11-drv-ati-6.13.0-0.21.20100219gite68d3a389.fc12.i686
   xorg-x11-drv-r128-6.8.1-2.fc12.i686
Such a machine is quite usable.

> For comparison, the baseline for the GPU in the phone in your pocket -
> and that platform layers like clutter more or less expect - is GLES 2.0,
> which is roughly comparable to DirectX 9.  We're rapidly approaching the
> point where the software renderer is going to be a more satisfying
> experience than hardware 3d support for these chips, both for features
> and for performance.

How rapidly?  Today, which one leads in "satisfying experience", and by how much?

> [snip]
> So in my ideal world, we would simply drop the -dri1 subpackage (and for
> that matter, DRI1 support in the X server).

Such a wish would be better justified by statistics on usage
(smolt, at least) and support effort (size and rate of change in
source commits, number of maintainers with relevant experience, ...)

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