id	summary	reporter	owner	description	type	status	priority	milestone	component	version	severity	resolution	keywords	cc
18267	Consider archiving xf86-video-*	Xi Ruoyao	blfs-book	"The KMS driver shipped in xorg-server already supports the acceleration
for Xorg via Glamor.  So when a GPU is supported by Mesa Gallium 3D, the
KMS driver automatically supports Glamor acceleration.

For ATI/AMD:

- The GPUs supported by xf86-video-ati are all supported by Mesa (r300 or r600 drivers).
- The GPUs supported by xf86-video-amdgpu are all supported by Mesa (radeonsi driver).

For Intel:

- Everything after the ""Grantsdale"" chipset (910GL and 915GL/GV/G, launched in 2004) is supported by Mesa (i915, crocus, or iris drivers).
- The latest models (Alder Lake, Raptor Lake, and discrete Intel GPUs) are not supported by xf86-video-intel at all, but they are supported by KMS driver.
- The development of xf86-video-intel seems stopped.
- The only models supported by xf86-video-intel but not KMS are 845 - 865 chipsets.  They were launched in 2001-2003.

For Nouveau:

- Everything after NV30 (Geforce FX 5xxx, launched in 2003) but not RTX 30/40 series is supported by Mesa.
- NV140 (Titan V and Quadro GV100) and NV160 (RTX 20 series and GTX 16 series) are supported by KMS, but not xf86-video-nouveau.
- The models supported by xf86-video-nouveau but not KMS are NV04 (RIVA TNT), NV10 (Geforce 256, Geforce 2, Geforce 4, Quadro, Quadro 2, Quadro 4), NV20 (Geforce 3, Geforce 4 Ti, Quadro DCC, Quadro 4, XBOX GPU). They were launched in 1999-2003.

For VMWare:  The VMWare GPU is supported by Mesa (the svga driver).

For fbdev:  Is it really tested for latest BLFS releases?

So the conclusions:

1. xf86-video-* do not provide more functionalities than the built-in KMS driver, except for very old GPUs.  And I don't think people will like to build LFS on some pre-2004 systems...
2. If we'd keep xf86-video-*, we need to spend a lot of time to describe their rationale (i.e. why and when they are better than KMS).  Or people can start to install drivers not really useful (for example, installing xf86-video-intel on Raptor Lake is completely useless).
3. With the maintenance effort liberated we can use it on some modern thing (like virglrender for QEMU).

To me it's the time to archive xf86-video-*.  Or is there some reason
we must keep them (or some of them)?
"	enhancement	closed	normal	12.0	BOOK	git	medium	fixed