Well-known Zink developer and Valve employee Mike Blumenkrantz is working on improving Mesa’s OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver. Starting in October, he removed a lot of old Mesa code, and in the recently merged PR for Mesa 22.3-devel, he again removed about 17.1k lines of old Mesa code.

According to foreign media Phoronix, the 17K code deleted this time is mainly concentrated in Old Gallium3D feature/tool ​​code, like removed from Mesa Rbug/GRAW/XvMC:

• The removed old XvMC front end for Gallium3D accounted for 3.5k lines of code. X-Video Motion Compensation (XvMC) is an extension to the X.Org server that allows some video offloading to be done on the GPU. But XvMC is only useful for MPEG-1/MPEG-2 video content, which is long outdated. In the past few years, VA-API and VDPAU API completely killed XvMC.
• Rbug was also removed as another 7k lines of obsolete code. Gallium3D’s Rbug was developed by Tungsten Graphics / VMware and was originally intended as a remote debugger pipeline driver to help remotely debug graphics issues. However, this remote debugging tool for Gallium3D has been largely unmaintained or fixed in 10 years, and even its remote debugging interface rbug-gui has not seen any code commits since 2014.
• Gallium3D GRAW was also removed, as another 6.5k lines of unmaintained code, Gallium3D GRAW was a front-endless raw Gallium Interface, as an ancient interface, it often hinders developers from modifying the interface.

In addition to making Mesa lighter, another benefit of removing a lot of unmaintained code is that it allows Mesa developers to more easily make changes to the Gallium3D interface without having to update these basically unused components, or worry about breaking them. function that will not be used.