Graphics driver support in F21+

[Adam Jackson]

On Wed, 2013-08-28 at 10:13 -0400, Basil Mohamed Gohar wrote:

> Sorry to come out of left field like this, but would the system profile
> info we collect on install be useful in determining the weight of the
> need for some of these drivers?  For example, if there is still a bunch
> of SIS video adapters out there, we might prioritize support for that
> driver, but then not for others that don't show-up in our hardware surveys.

We don't actually collect this information anymore, smolt has been put
out of its misery.  Which is a shame, in a sense, but smolt never did
work particularly well so I guess I don't mind.

But I don't think it'd be very useful in any event.  The ati, intel, and
nouveau drivers each have about an order of magnitude more open bugs
filed than all of the to-be-orphaned drivers _combined_.  geode's
relatively recent, but has a maintainer.  mga is the only one you can
get in PCIE form factor, and there's already KMS support for some
variants of it, so the barrier to proper support is pretty low should
someone actually be interested.  Outside of mga the most recent hardware
in that list at all is probably either sis or trident, and neither of
those has seen new hardware support (or any other real maintenance)
since about 2005.  And (again outside of mga) the most recent PCI cards
of anything in that set would probably have been made in 2002 or so, at
this point they are likely to be physically damaged just by powering
them on.

So mga and sis I feel a little bad about, and if we had infinite
resources it'd be cool to support them better.  But we don't, so if we
have to decide between fixing support for ten-year-old designs or making
your next laptop light up, well, it's not a hard decision.

- ajax