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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."
Xorg support for these cards isn't going away anytime soon though.
Climate Progress - Hell and High Water
Not sure that makes sense...from the article: "Code that was mostly unmaintained and didn't receive new feature support work in years." The volunteers already quit working on it years ago: this is just being honest about it.
Want to keep using the hardware? Just keep using the 7.11 release.
Try as we might, we just can't manage to get you people to migrate to more modern hardware. Frozen and unchanging code means exactly that, the code is not being improved in any manner. We recently redid both the UI and video rendering interfaces. Say we want to further add some animation support to the video renderer for use on the OSD, that code needs to be written for each of Xshm, Xv, OpenGL, VDPAU, VAAPI, XvMC, and PVR-350 framebuffer output. In addition, that's primarily the work of one single guy. XvMC hasn't been supported on any useful hardware sold in the last couple years, and the PVR-350 hasn't been sold for over half a decade. So, we can either continue to support all of those modes, or we can drop the "old cruft" and maybe the people who aren't so cheap as to be unwilling to spend $20 on a video card can have something that looks a bit nicer.