There are two major package classes in Fedora that provide graphics
drivers: xorg-x11-drv-*, and mesa-dri-drivers-*.
In F15, mesa-dri-drivers now only includes drivers with DRI2 support
(radeon, nvidia, intel) and the software renderer; if you want all the
older drivers you have to install mesa-dri-drivers-dri1. This list is:
i810, mga, r128, savage, sis, tdfx, unichrome
Basically all of this hardware is, ahem, inept. The most featureful
device supported by these drivers would be the MGA G550, which just
barely manages to do DirectX 7 (comparable to a Radeon 7000 or GeForce
2, both ~1999 vintage). All the others are back in the DX6 stone age.
For comparison, the baseline for the GPU in the phone in your pocket -
and that platform layers like clutter more or less expect - is GLES 2.0,
which is roughly comparable to DirectX 9. We're rapidly approaching the
point where the software renderer is going to be a more satisfying
experience than hardware 3d support for these chips, both for features
and for performance.
So in my ideal world, we would simply drop the -dri1 subpackage (and for
that matter, DRI1 support in the X server).
For 2D we've got an xorg-x11-drivers metapackage that includes, well,
pretty much everything, and which is included in comps as a default.
This is lame, because it means a bunch of backwater drivers end up as
critical path and can never possibly get tested. (Smolt says there are
all of 3 savage users. I assume the number of i740 users is actually
negative.) The list of video drivers that see any actual use is
probably something like:
ast, ati, cirrus, fbdev, geode, intel, mga, nouveau, openchrome,
qxl, sis/xgi, vesa, vmware
And input is even briefer (evdev, synaptics, wacom, vmmouse). I'd like
to chop the -drivers metapackage down to just this set, and either make
a new metapackage in optional for -drivers-retrocomputing or simply list
all the drivers there individually. Note that since we're keeping
drivers for fbdev and vesa we should still get graphics on most devices
even if the user doesn't explicitly ask for a native driver.
So that's the rough plan. Comments appreciated if I'm overlooking
anything.
- ajax
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