The DRM-Next branch of Linux 6.3 submits a new drm-misc-next pull request that most importantly cleans up seven old DRM drivers for legacy hardware that are no longer available in open source maintenance, its supporting code will also be removed from the kernel.

The main ones that were removed were the following DRM drivers: i810, mga, r128, savage, sis, tdfx, and via.

• i810– The Intel i810 driver is for older Intel i8xx/pre-i915 series chipsets.
• mga – Drivers for very old Matrox graphics cards.
• r128 – Kernel driver for ATI Rage 128 graphics cards.
• savage – Supports all generations of VIA / S3 Savage graphics chipsets with SuperSavage and ProSavage hardware.
• sis – Old SiS drivers.
• tdfx – Old 3Dfx codes such as Voodoo Banshee, Voodoo3, Voodoo4 and Voodoo5…
• via – Old VIA graphics chipset code

These drivers are all very old graphics/display hardware, have been marked as obsolete about seven years ago, they rely on User Space Mode Settings (UMS), and are not maintained nor targeted like modern DRM drivers Kernel Mode Settings (KMS) and other features are tuned.

No one has actively maintained these drivers for years, and when they were marked obsolete in 2016, it was pointed out that the drives hadn’t been used and maintained since 2008…nor have any of these older drives changed since then , nobody improved/maintained them.

In Linux 6.3, these old drivers will be removed from the mainline kernel, and removing these old DRM kernel drivers can reduce about 20k lines of code. Details of this can be found in this drm-misc-next pull, and if anyone is interested in rewriting and maintaining these drivers, the relevant code is available from past kernel releases/Git.