Comment 95 for bug 6270

@legolas, it should not come as a surprise that all of the video drivers maintained by a company (-fglrx, -nvidia, -intel) have cut-offs in terms of how old of hardware they continue to support. Like you I don't think this is a good thing, but certainly from their business perspective is is the right financial move.

Where -intel differs from nVidia and ATI, is that they have chosen to make their primary supported driver be open source. The reason this is significant, is because if nVidia or ATI choose to stop supporting some old hardware in their driver, you as a consumer are screwed - you are forced to either buy new hardware, or write your own driver from scratch. Thankfully, for both nVidia and ATI, community people have already done the hard reverse engineering work, thus making decent alternatives available for community people wishing to continue using the older hardware.

Intel's open-source-friendly strategy has provided a third choice: You have full access to the primary driver's source code and can thus add and improve the support in the driver yourself.

Now, you may feel that you do not have the time, know-how, inclination, or hardware to take this route. But when you chose to support Intel's open source strategy by buying their hardware, having this route as an option was a privilege and a right that you (and the whole community) gained as a result.

Most rights come with responsibility, and in this case that means that if and when Intel the corporation chooses to stop supporting something (and they haven't stopped supporting i855 entirely yet, just this specific feature), the effort to develop and maintaining it has to come from the community - likely someone who doesn't consider themselves a driver developer, but who has the gumption to give it a shot.

I would love to see a vibrant little community emerge around providing support on 8xx cards, figure out code to extract from -i810 or whatever, and start regularly testing/maintaining 8xx support in -intel. I suspect what we need is not some single big hero but a bunch of little heroes each contributing a piece of the puzzle, and through collaboration getting 8xx solidified and full-featured once again.