Slashdot Mirror
Linux Support Fades For 3Dfx Voodoo, Rage 128, VIA
An anonymous reader writes "The developers behind the Mesa 3D graphics library, which provides the default graphics driver support for most hardware on Linux (and BSD/Solaris), has ended their support for older hardware. Being removed from Mesa (and therefore versions of Linux distributions) is support for hardware like the 3Dfx Voodoo, Intel i810, ATI Rage, and S3 Savage graphics processors. Also drivers being dropped were for Matrox and VIA graphics. Mesa developers also decided it's time to end support for the BeOS operating system. Dropping this code lowered the developers' responsibility by some 100k L.O.C., so maybe we will see GL3 support and OpenCL in Linux a bit sooner."
Sounds like it's time for a legacy fork for old machines. Or maybe just keeping old versions alive, the way Linux distros do with other libraries.
-- hendrik
This is news? Trimming out old cruft from a source code tree isn't a big deal.
I'm sure "SlashdotMedia" will improve on all the wonders that Dice Holdings blessed us all with
Matrox!?!
I still use this card for dual- head support on my P100.
Maybe the resources freed by the team can be used in providing support for Elite/Impact framebuffers on classic SGI Indigo?
I will consider that an exchange worth making.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Xorg support for these cards isn't going away anytime soon though.
Climate Progress - Hell and High Water
When I read the headline, my first thought was Linux now supports fades on these old graphic cards :-)
I can understand people tinkering old machines to install home servers or whatever, as I used to do, but expecting 3D on these sounds somewhat pointless. Thanks for the info.
Ending support for BeOS? What about Haiku, which is alive and thriving ( http://haiku-os.org )?
Mesa developers also decided it's time to end support for the BeOS operating system.
One of Adam Jackson's fixes to X was "glx: unifdef BEOS_THREADS"
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Nope, not using any machine with such graphics cards anymore.
I'm replaying some games from that era though. With wine and my modern NVidia card. These games work better in wine than Win7 can run them, if I have to believe the info about these games online.
I thought that one of Linux's claims to fame was that you could run it on ancient hardware? These cards aren't anywhere close to ancient, and are actively in use in who knows how many machines.
I don't respond to AC's.
OpenCL in Linux
I do believe that support for OpenCL in Linux is in the best interest of the GPGPU manufacturers(AMD, nVidia). Because Linux based HPC systems dominate the market and Windows ain't going to unseat Linux anytime soon. Thus you might not have all the features of the 3D stack, however OpenCL is definitely something fully implemented by AMD and nVidia.
it's cheaper to just buy a new machine to use for a home server than pay for the electricity hogged up by old hardware
This does not seem like a healthy trend.
was the problem with the new software that it used too much RAM and CPU?
or was the problem that it didnt support old hardware graphics drivers?
those are two massively different problems.
"Seems like it should require almost no effort."
your lucky to even find drivers for Haiku, and how many 3D applications that you NEED to have running on a AGP1-2x or PCI card (which for the most part is what we are talking about here)
seriously?
is not included in the cost that the power plant charges you, since power plants dont currently have to pay anything related to global warming, or ocean acidification.
Most or all of these drivers were already broken because no one cared enough to maintain them or even test them from time to time. Anyone who needs the old drivers can compile out an older version of Mesa from git and run that. Which they already had to do.
It was also said that if someone comes along who is actually interested in maintaining one of the removed drivers, that the driver would be restored to the source tree.
Nothing to see here, move along.
No, Beos ... nooooooooooooooo (do it yourself)
I remember buying my first "real" 3d card. It was an ATI Rage Fury 128. It had a whopping 32 megs of memory. And shitty ass drivers. Good times, good times...
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Install something that was released around the time the computer was sold.
Computer : 2006 Install Ubuntu 6.04 - 8.10 / Slackware 10.2 - Slackware 12
Computer 2010 - present : Install Ubuntu 10.04 etc
I'm typing this on a FreeBSD machine with an R128 graphics card and 128 MB of system RAM (waiting for my laptop to come back from repairs). It can run firefox locally, but I'm using it over networked X11 because it's a bit faster (it's running on my gateway/server machine). It is my main machine at the moment, and it's working very well. Things like xterm, gvim and irssi and ssh are perfectly fine!
Many people have the idea that computers get slower just by being old, but I think /. readers are aware that it's just the software that gets more complex. I understand that MESA would make this decision, and I hope that it was motivated by some worthwhile changes in the APIs, maybe linked with supporting new and exciting devices.
The problem with dropping support is that many organisation take away the old versions from their web or ftp sites. I experienced this recently, trying to get Python 2.6 for windows, because some software depended on it. I would have to build Python myself, but found somewhere to copy it from . If these people don't make the old version available, then years of coding effort will be lost, code which could still have benefited many people.
Seriously, I still have 10+ card that fall in this group. Guess I really should give them up to be recycled seeing as how they don't support wide screen and I'd be hard pressed to find enough MoBos for them to use that DON'T have better integrated GPUs.
I've thought for some time that the "you can run it on ancient hardware that Windows doesn't support" is a terrible argument in favour of Linux (and F/OSS in general) for a couple of reasons:
1. Software that needs to care about the hardware (such as the Linux kernel or the Mesa library) is not exempt from this being a fast-moving industry, and updating drivers is not without cost in terms of effort. Effort that could be better spent elsewhere.
2. I think it hurts credibility to say "Support for more hardware than Windows!" (But most of the supported hardware is at least five years old, some of it's twenty years old! If you want to use a chipset that's been out less than a few months, expect pain!).
See my previous comment on another newsstory (please subsitute/C3/S3/gc -- it was a brain hiccup):
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2400452&cid=37226492
Now, this is somewhat related, but I have a notebook with another old processor (still supported but limited in oomph). It's almost a mobile thing and runs at 500MHz; the idea is being powersavvy not speedy.
At work, we had to deal with gigantic files which took ages to come up in vim on Vista (on two powerful machines, over a year ago). I just transferred the file to my old note and browsed/split it in a Linux terminal. The 2 (sometimes 3) resulting pieces were imported back to Vista and life proceeded as normal.
The point is I couldn't use traditional M$ tools on Windows: the existing tools found 4GB RAM not enough for the job! I could install Cygwin, but wth... the notebook was there waiting to be useful.
Many are now getting unemployed. What if some dude finds a job which requires him to have a computer? Simple, he buys an old gig (maybe even 8-year old) but since he's knowledgeable, he'll just have to pull an allnighter (and probably will even manage to sleep, as the computer may do the processing by itself) and make some money by delivering the results next morning.
Think family back in business; think poor guy in Africa working with old PCs donated; think a poor family kid following Woz steps -- and not losing opportuinites because of poverty.
It was released in 2004, 7 years ago. If that's the most recent thing you can show running (never mind the really nasty hacks necessary to make it run) well that just furthers his point: You aren't running modern software.
The i810 was used in systems and cards much more recently than the 3dfx cards mentioned, for that matter 3dfx ceased to exist prior to many of the cards and systems that came out with i810 chips.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Now I can finally see what I've been playing all this time.
The bigger question is how can these improvements be ported to other graphics accelerators, so we can render framerate and polygon with minimal texturing as to improve responsiveness and therefore competitive gameplay.
In other terms on similar note, would be like comparing the effectiveness of Starcraft 1 to the slower Starcraft 2: we just want to play the game with it's set of rules and not get slowed-down by the unnecessary drama of the story playing-out in slow graphics rendering.
Ah the good old days. Sticking in the 3dfx voodoo card (and later a second one, attached to eachother) and running Moto Racer. Awesome!
But yeah, most on-board videocards nowadays are already better than that, so i can understand the move. Thanks though, for supporting it :)
RTFA. This is about MESA, not Linux.
asrock PV530 is a cpu+motherboard sold at 50 euros, making it the single less expensive way to build a dekstop PC or server from new parts. it's at 1.8GHz and needs an added gigabit card, so eats more power but you can finely set up frequency and voltage, even overclock it. It has been running nice as a NAS, DHCP, tftp, ssh etc. though with a lot of overhead from using ntfs-3g (haven't got the money to shift the storage to ext4 or something yet).
http://www.google.com/imgres?q=%22APK+3dFx%22&hl=en&biw=983&bih=646&gbv=2&tbm=isch&tbnid=tlK_FPqt3n0slM:&imgrefurl=http://apk-3dfx-tuning-engine.softonic.com/&docid=gzmI1lZix9WbWM&w=612&h=443&ei=_kNZTp2SI6PE0AHx-YyfDA&zoom=1
(Yes... those were the days!)
APK
P.S.=> Heh, I personally cannot believe it's still "out there" actually... but, it is:
http://www.google.com/webhp?hl=en&tab=iw&q=%22APK%203dFx%22#sclient=psy&hl=en&site=webhp&source=hp&q=%22APK+3dFx+Tuning+Engine%22&pbx=1&oq=%22APK+3dFx+Tuning+Engine%22&aq=f&aqi=&aql=1&gs_sm=e&gs_upl=8714l11357l0l11871l14l12l0l0l0l7l377l3044l0.2.5.4l11l0&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.&fp=87cd2c56f2a7d925&biw=983&bih=646
(The web NEVER forgets, & it must be (astounding though it is to even imagine it) that folks STILL use the old 3dFx Voodoo I, II, III, V boards even nowadays...)
... apk
the second paragraph I forgot to write : its integrated graphics is ill supported. there are proprietary drivers, but only for ubuntu and suse. not debian! open source drivers are outdated and don't work, unless you find out you can build the SVN version and get a working 2D only one.
it's a very recent VX900 chipset, launched a year ago, less well supported than some 10-year-old cards (forget about the built-in h264 decoding, too!). I do use a very light desktop (startx and lxde-core) on the server for slow web browsing with firefox 6.
it's a pity that I can't run counterstrike 1.5 or quake 2.
funnily, the MESA announcement seems to include that chipset too.
I had a machine that had i810 graphics (don't ever get that if you have any kind of choice). Its onboard graphics that rob main memory for video memory (and the resolution isn't that great, and the speed isn't that great, and I recycled the machine at least 5 years ago, and it had been basically decommissioned for at least 5 years before that, and I only used the box for about 3 years --the shortest amount of time I have ever used a computer-- and also I swore at that time (about 10 years ago) to never buy HP again. i810 graphics support gone? Meh! I understand that there might be some really really old machines with motherboards that are un-upgradeable, and for those people there should be a set of legacy libraries (with free software, support never dies since the software never actually goes away). Pull it out of the mainline though, so developers can move on, clean up the mainline, and move forward.
A developer talented enough to sustain modern 3D acceleration standards for 15-year old proprietary hardware could do much more for the FLOSS community.
I have a '99 laptop (K6-2 processor, no less) running SliTaz-- it boots in seconds, and does some lightweight tasks really well.
you can use Vmware convertor for free to move those old PC's into virtual machines running on ESXi 5.0. It's is now available for download for free and it works great on my $200 4 year old E7200 with 4GB of ram. I had a customer move an entire room full old Windows 3.5 & 4.0 servers, Linux and Netware 4.1 machines to one physical ESX server, and the new hard ware will pay for itself in 3 months in just power savings, and ALL thos apps are running much faster sharing a 3GHz cpu, DDR3 ram, 15k rpm sas drive, and now using gigabit network.
Precisely.
If you want to keep current with a browser like Firefox without having to compile your own version, you have to have a system with SSE2 instructions. That means a Pentium 4 or Athlon 64, not an ancient late-90s system. Usability for modern web browsing also requires heavy amounts of running javascript with modern DOM/CSS standards, which even P4/A64's can have significant struggles doing. Running Flash 10.X also requires a hefty system, and most P4/A64's barely meet the minimum system requirements.
And Win2K (abandonware since July 2010) still only supports IE6 as its system's browser. Unless you spend a lot of time to customize it to root out any access to the IE6 Trident engine and security model under Win2K, your systems are vulnerable to the same crap US-CERT pointed out in 2004. And Windows XP will be in the same unpatched, abandonware boat as Win2K in little over 2.5 years (April 2014).
Blame it on Windows, but would you really install an exploitable Debian 2.X / or even 3.0 from the same time line in the Linux world? And if you don't care about usability on the web, care about security, and have rock-bottom systems, have people use Lynx. Good luck with that.
get a real video card.
While 3dfx clung to a crippled OpenGL interface in favor of GLIDE, MesaGL on windows could run Quake 3 with graphical acceptability on twin voodoo2 cards, whereas 3dfx's driver that they refused to update would have ugly white boxes everywhere there was partial transparency used.
There's stuff like Puppylinux for this. I do agree with the principle though, if there's is functionality being lost here, then really a older X.Org and Mesa package for support of older cards makes sense IMHO. That said, removing support for these from Mesa is not a loss, and here is why:
The Voodoo2 I used to use would rune Quake3, at about 20-30FPS -- to the disbelief of some people at the LAN parties I went to, they figured I must have a newer card than that. The Linux driver ended up being considerably faster than the Windows one. However, it really would not have enough video RAM and is missing quite a few capabilities to run most newer OpenGL software. An OpenGL-based desktop is right out. My friend had a Matrox G400 back in the day, same story though -- it ran Quake3 well enough but most newer stuff wouldn't be good at all on it. I did manage to bring up a OpenGL desktop on it once, but it would only display it at like 800x600 or so, and was very slow.
I have used an I810, the Rage128, and the allegedly 3D-capable S3 models, and I never did see anything resembling reasonable OpenGL on them. They had triangle setup engines, but that was about it -- I don't think they even support putting textures on the triangles.
It's important to note, these still will have the (quite functional) 2D support still.
I've got 3yo enterprise class server hardware running red hat with a Rage graphics card onboard.
I hope just because they are discontinuing BeOS support they don't discontinue Haiku support too...
Interesting that the biggest FUD against NVIDIA's proprietary drivers is that they would drop support for older boards and leave end users without support.
NVIDIA now supports older legacy boards than the open source equivalents, and updates them on a regular basis for newer kernels and X ABIs. (certainly there's no new features added, but they are being maintained)
Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!
Hopefully there won't be an impact on Haiku...
I wonder what other cool features they will implement for the VooDoo!
I still do some OpenGL development against my Powermac B&W with ATI Rage 128. My 3D programs are so basic that it doesn't tax this old hardware, unless I did something wrong. It's a good sanity check for when I did do something wrong.
Not a big deal though, I haven't upgraded Debian on it in a couple years. And I dual-boot Mac OS X 10.3 on it (but I might switch to 10.4)
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
In some time someone maybe will rewrite it for the newest architecture.I mean only the DRI1 code was removed so a rewrite would make it faster/easier to maintain.
As typical with Linux, I am hoping that support will be retained, even if not developed further. It would be a shame to drop support completely, and Linux typically is excellent at retaining support for older hardware.
My laptop is a 9 years old Mitac Celeron M, 1.2Ghz with i810 graphics. It works perfectly and I don't need nor plan to buy a new one. Over the years, I saw Linux support becoming better and better for this all-Intel laptop. However, since 2008, things become more and more difficult. Features like KMS are hard to get working. Newer X drivers don't work anymore, requiring manual tuning to Xorg.conf to use "i810" instead of "intel". It means that installing a new Linux distro almost always requires text mode/kernel options. Although my laptop is nearly entierely made of Intel components, hardware support never reached 100% and will obviously never be. Sensors drivers, for example, were never written. I even tried to write them myself.
Ten years ago, as many others around the world, I advocated "Linux" saying it was lighter than Windows and did work on older hardware. I attended many LUG meetings, install parties and other kinds of events. I was installing Linux on 486s with Pentium Overdrives we donated to people who could not afford a computer. I was saying to everybody that Windows was evil. It was evil because "Microsoft had secret agreements with hardware vendors" so they would bloat windows and stop old hardware support to force people to buy a new computer.
Today, it's the same for Linux. Hardware vendors "contribute" to Linux (the kernel, X drivers and so on). In fact, they control Linux totally and don't have any plan to make it compatible with older hardware.
Now, I'll be forced to either stick with old software (and old bugs and old security issues) or go buy a new laptop.
how can they do this?!
after years of work, the drivers were 100% optimized, bug free and written with proper coding style, while not giving up a single bit from true Open Source spirit.
There are still some things to say in favour of Linux :
- Support shutdown: the removal of older drivers is mainly due to the lack of support for these drivers. Absolutely no one is maintaining them anymore. They have not been patched for year, they are just accumulating cruft, their older architecture is just standing in the way and blocking progress for more/better acceleration.
Had someone showed up to reprise the maintenance of this drivers, perhaps they wouldn't be cut of. But currently, nobody in the community is volunteering to maintain them.
The situation is rather different from companies with proprietary drivers which could have the resources to maintain an older fork.but don't do it, because they want the users to move to newer hardware.
- The good thing with Linux and open source in general, is the availability of choice. Okay, perhaps that these drivers won't be available in the latest Mesa/Gallium3D version. But. Older mesa and Xorg driver didn't suddenly stop existing. Just like KDE 3.x was still around for some time while KDE 4.x matured. You can bet that, on some of the popular distro, you'll see community efforts to offer alternative repositories with the older i810 drivers still available except older Mesa to start showing up in Ubuntu's PPA or SuSE's extra repositories.
- Probably, while Ubuntu, Fedora and the like will move forward to the latest drivers, but it's very likely that distros which specialise into older hardware will be less eager to move to the newer version. Just like DamnSmall Linux continued using 2.4 kernel long after 2.6 was out.
- And all things said, the older version will probably still be available for DIY distros like Gentoo. Allowing you to mix and match version of software to handle unsupported drivers.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]