r300 driver in extras?

[Jonathan Dieter]

Mike, I've been following the fedora-devel mailing list, and I 
understand why you removed r300 support in Mesa and the kernel.  I was 
working through a bug where OpenGL didn't work at all (even in indirect 
mode), and, in the process, rebuilt both Mesa and the kernel after 
removing your fixes.  Apparently, I'm one of the lucky ones whose Radeon 
9600 works with the experimental driver because it all started working.  
I'm now thinking of putting together a package (similar to the 
proprietary one in livna) that would give accelerated 3D to any Radeon 
users willing to take the risk.

It seems that the only difference in Mesa when the r300 is enabled is 
that an extra file (r300_dri.so) is installed in /usr/lib64/dri, and 
that the only difference in the kernel is the drm module is patched to 
not recognize the r300 PCI ids.  It seems that the Mesa problem could be 
easily fixed, but what is the easiest way to fix the kernel (aside from 
providing my own (un)patched kernel)?  Will X even try to load the DRM 
module if Mesa doesn't provide r300_dri.so but the kernel does provide 
the PCI id's?  If it doesn't, could we re-enable the r300 PCI ids in the 
kernel and just ship Mesa without the r300 driver?  If it does, is there 
any other possible solution to the kernel that I'm missing?

I've been using the fglrx driver in earlier version of Fedora for years 
now and would love to take this chance to move off of it and helping 
others move off in the process is a bonus.

Thanks,
Jonathan Dieter