Re: r128/radeon drivers

On Wed, 19 Nov 2003, Alex Deucher wrote:

>As we add new drivers to the fd.o xserver project, would it make sense
>to merge the r128 and radeon drivers?  They are pretty similar
>architecture-wise and a lot of the features from radeon (dualhead,
>newer Xv feauters, better DDC, DRI improvements) could benefit the r128
>driver.  plus less fixing stuff in both places.  on the down side, it
>would make the driver some what bigger, although we could break the
>source down into more files which might make it easier to manage as a
>whole.  The current mga driver supports all mga cards.  we could
>potentially roll mach64 in as well, but it doesn't seem to be
>structured quite as similarly as radeon and r128.

It's a lot of extra work, and long term maintenance for IMHO
little gain.  Fewer and fewer people use R128 nowadays, and more
and more use Radeon.  It is entirely likely to believe Radeon
changes will break R128 now and then, and nobody will fix them
because they don't have the hardware and/or simply don't care
about R128 enough to fix them.

The two drivers have similarity, but IMHO it is best leaving them
separate.  There haven't been many people doing much with R128
for about 2 years now, so I assume that most R128 problem reports
would likely not get much attention.  There are certainly a share 
of R128 bugs in the current XFree86 driver that have been there 
for a long time now with no attention anyway.

-- 
Mike A. Harris