Graphics driver support in F21+

[Al Dunsmuir]

On Thursday, October 24, 2013, 4:41:09 PM, Adam Jackson wrote:
> On Tue, 2013-08-27 at 10:46 -0400, Adam Jackson wrote:
>> For F21, I plan to orphan the following X video drivers:
>> ...
>> xorg-x11-drv-mach64
>> xorg-x11-drv-r128
>> ...
> These have now been orphaned.

I would like to volunteer to pick up ownership of these two packages.
I would also like to assist with the F21 Radeon graphics test day.

I will need someone in turn to volunteer to be my sponsor since I am
not (yet) a Fedora packager.  Later this week, I will start the full
"How to get sponsored into the packager group" process.

I've been experiencing difficulties with a R300-family laptop since
Fedora 17 (worked great with Gnome 3 at GA, then regressed, then back
to working near F17 EOL).  Fedora 18 and 19 did not work, and I've been
forced to use Mate.

It comes as no surprise that with limited resources (time, hardware,
or interest) the current developers were not able to investigate my
bugzilla entry.  I had decided in early summer that I would be best
served to investigate deeper myself.

I figured that a good place to start would be verification.  I've been
gathering the necessary resources to test the older Radeon releases
(originally R100, R200, R300, and early R600) and it grew into covering
the original ATI Mach64 and R128 ranges too.

Between discrete video cards, a few laptops, integrated GPUs and APUs
I can now test approximately 30 different Radeon, R128 and Mach 64
video configurations.  I am finishing setup of dedicated test hardware
for AGP (1X,2X,4X,8X), PCI-E (and naturally PCI).  To cover non-x86/x64,
I've also got an Apple G5 with AGP 8X Radeon 9650.   For display, aside
from the usual full and wide screen LCDs, I picked up a Samsung CRT to
ensure that side is covered.

This is while also covering the usual real life (work, plus I've been
busy all summer doing renovations to my mother-in-law's townhouse
(drywall, and some significant rewiring).  I can see the light at the
end of that tunnel now, and look forward to some time of my own to
learn and play.  8^)

While my original intent was to contribute primarily as a tester, I
do have a hardware and software background that I hope I can grow to
active support and development.

Given time I would like to migrate these over to using KMS.  Provided
that goes well, the next goal would be to learn OpenGL basics and get
up to speed by fixing some mesa issues I have with R300, R200, and R100.
Beyond that, the goal would proper mach64 and R128 mesa drivers that
would be suitable for reintegration (vs. the obsolete drivers that were
removed in Dec 2012).

Al

PS: My EE bachelor's final project (in 1979... sigh) was a S-100
    bus video card with text and overlaid grayscale bit graphics.
    I initially worked at IBM on hardware testing of memory, PC
    and integrated displays before moving on to mainframe debuggers
    and the C/C++ compiler group.  It's been a while, but I'm hoping
    that some of that will still prove relevant and useful.  8^)