Is XAA still supported in recent and future xserver?

[Matt Turner]

On Mon, Sep 13, 2010 at 3:09 PM, Tiago Vignatti
<tiago.vignatti at nokia.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 13, 2010 at 05:26:34PM +0200, ext Alex Deucher wrote:
>> On Mon, Sep 13, 2010 at 11:18 AM, Matt Dew <matt at osource.org> wrote:
>> > Is that something that should go on a TODO (wish)list?  Move remaining
>> > DDXs from XXA to EXA? Maybe improve those drivers' performance on EXA
>> > first?
>>
>> I'm not sure it's worth the effort.  Much of the older hardware isn't
>> even capable of EXA (lack of offset-based blitters for solid/copy and
>> the lack of 3D engines for composite).  For hw that is, it's a lot of
>> work for old hardware that hardly anyone one uses.  I suppose there
>> are a few chips that are still used where it may make sense.  In many
>> cases shadowfb is as fast or faster than the blitters on these old
>> chips anyway. XAA is mostly sw rendering now anyway.
>
> so this means we could deprecate XAA from the server, and if one cares about
> it we recommend to use old servers?
>
>             Tiago

I understand the urge to slim the server down, but deprecating XAA
isn't the way to do this.

In order to deprecate something, there needs to be a replacement. As
others in this thread have stated, there is hardware for which EXA is
slower than XAA or does not work all together. So EXA is not a 1:1
replacement for XAA.

I can't see why being able to remove XAA (which would be the intended
goal of deprecating it) would help anything anyway. The xserver can
already be easily built without XAA.

Matt