If Linux 6.19 switching from the Radeon legacy to AMDGPU kernel drivers for the GCN 1.0/1.1 GPUs for those ~13 year old GPUs isn’t nostalgic enough for you, here’s something a bit more nostalgic this holiday season: fresh open-source driver commits to the Radeon R300g driver for supporting those 23 year old ATI R300 GPUs up through the 20 year old R500 class graphics processors.
Open-source community contributor Pavel Ondračka worked out pop-free clipping support for the R300 Gallium3D driver in Mesa. Pop-free clipping ensures that clipped primitives are still valid and visible if crossing a clip volume boundary rather than just being discarded. This pop-free clipping support in turn fixes a number of dEQP OpenGL ES 2 test case failures that had been observed on R300 through R500 (Radeon X1000 series) graphics cards.
This pop-free clipping is based on this R600 driver commit from another community contributor earlier in the year that in turn was based on newer code from the RadeonSI driver used by Radeon GCN and newer graphics cards.
Pavel opened up this merge request two months ago to land the pop-free clipping support for R300g. This code was since tested across various R300/400/500 graphics cards. After working through some issues, the code was merged yesterday just in time for the Christmas holiday season.
It’s increasingly rare seeing Mesa R300 Gallium3D driver activity for those 20+ year old graphics cards, but occasionally bug fixes and new feature work such as this pop-free clipping still come about thanks to the open-source nature of the drivers and still living within the Mesa driver tree. This now-merged R300g work will be found in Q1’s Mesa 26.0 feature release.
