Vintage AMD R600 Graphics Driver Sees Code Cleanups Thanks To GitHub Copilot

Phoronix reports: The AMD R600 Gallium3D driver saw 59 commits [last] Sunday to Mesa 26.2. Making this code restructuring and code cleaning all the more notable is that the improvements to this old AMD Radeon graphics driver was done in part by GitHub Copilot.

Gert Wollny has been among the few open-source developers left working on the AMD R600g driver that covers from the Radeon HD 2000 series through Radeon HD 6000 series graphics cards... [T]he old open-source GPU driver support is being assisted by AI long after the upstream vendor has stopped working on this driver — the Radeon HD 2000 "R600" series launched in 2007.

Re:Who's running this hardware

[leonbev]

If you're not gaming, those old Radeon HD graphics cards are perfectly functional as a basic display adapter. You really don't need more than that if you're spending all your time in Firefox doing basic web browsing, office work, and watching stuff on the Tube sites.

Re:

[Bert64]

You also don't need anything so power hungry, a modern integrated GPU would be better.

Re:

[noshellswill]

At this early stage of *.ai mass use, any application of the technology serves a good purpose. Same argument would hold true for writing, steam-engines and fibre-glass.  In a decade or so users of *.ai can/will evolve to more value-oriented tasks. For now ... practice ... practice ... practice ...

Re:

[jezwel]

Languished due to age and the manufacturer dropping support when it reached 10 years old (pretty good run TBH). While I doubt there's many of these left, there's still enough for the hobbyist developer to spend some time on them - and what better way to test AI than on something that's been optimised as much as it ever normally would be?
I'd also note that I've still got a few PCs and laptops of that vintage still bootable and able to run.

AI has no value my ass!!!

[williamyf]

Linus Torvalds, Greg H-K and the Mozilla team are singign the praises on AI for software maintenance. And now a 19 year old FOSS grapghics driver is still getting software improvements thanks to AI!

And yet some zealots are saying that AI has no use whatsoever...

You know what? More than one thing can be true at once.

Yes, is true that AI is not a panacea that will replace every single coder/white collar job.

Yes, is true that judiciously used, AI can be extremely useful for many task inside many a job description, including sw development.

The world is not black and white, or even shades of gray, at least for an electronics engineer like me is not only in technocolor, but in even more wavelenghts, and polarized horizontally, vertically and elliptically to boot :-P

Re:

[Narcocide]

Maybe they'll fix the Cirrus Logic driver next. :-p

Re:

[ffkom]

I for one would like some coding bot to pick up maintenance of the it87 driver. I mean, adapting such existing driver to newer kernel releases should not require any creativity, it would be the kind of menial work that humans in general would prefer to leave to the bots.

Re: AI has no value my ass!!!

[LindleyF]

I like doing code cleanups. My boss likes me doing stuff supporting business priorities. Thanks to coding AI, I now have the bandwidth to do both.

Re:

[drinkypoo]

It's not that it has no value. It's that it has no value without a trained human to evaluate and guide its work. Then the unfortunate corollary is that it makes most people dumber just to use it.

Re:

[drinkypoo]

You're too lazy to even have an identity. Run along, coward.

Re:

[karmawarrior]

You're taking an article that has clearly exaggerated the degree to which genAI "solved" an issue, promoting an genAI model that's widely mocked even among genAI addicts, and ignoring the massive negative externalities, and saying that somehow promotes the idea AI is perfect and all the AI critics are wrong*?

Where does your example address the externalities?

Why are you taking the TFA at face value, when literally every article puffing genAI here in the past has turned out to be massively exaggerating genAI'

Re:

[PsychoSlashDot]

And now a 19 year old FOSS grapghics driver is still getting software improvements thanks to AI!

Is it? Getting improvements?

I read the summary and yeah, it uses that word but... what - specifically - does it mean? The code was "cleaned up" and "restructured". So... were any bugs fixed? Is there any real-world performance increase? In what way has this driver improved?

This is elderly code which likely has had any impactful errors discovered and corrected. Any major changes at this juncture risk introducing new problems regardless of if they're made by a human or an AI coding tool. While rest

Re:

[SodaStream]

AI is useful, but it's important that its supervised. The accountability rule applies, and humans are, ultimately, the ones who need to be held accountable.

Re:

[williamyf]

Can we at least agree there is far too much money being thrown at AI and disproportionately allocating resources and priorities in favor of this anyways to the detriment of other markets and businesses that are useful to more people than AI is right now?

Maybe that will get better but optimization and refinement, and process and results should be a focus before massive scaling up

Yes and no. I've seen the same sht happen twice, in the same year.

First in the telco crash of early 2001, when telco shares collapsed, in no small part dues to the backbone fiber rollouts done for the nascent internet (as well as many telco customers became illiquid bidding for 3G spectrum), said backbone sat unussed for years (and the spectrum too), but, at least, the fiber did not depreciate at an alarming rate...

But then, by the middle of that same year 2001, the Internet bubble bust. Untold ammounts of

So the newest GPUs run LLMs instead of graphics...

[ffkom]

... while the people interested in better graphics cannot afford to buy a newer GPU to do so, because the newer GPUs are busy improving the driver for their old GPUs. What an irony!

Would be nice

[internetd00du]

Would be nice if these "ai" tools could optimise software for other outdated hardware.

I remember about a decade ago, my early android phone became unusable as the OS slowed so much.
I had a wild idea... if there was some way a super advanced AI could just rewrite the OS to be so optimised, that it would be fast again.
Maybe we're headed in that direction...

Re:

[sound+vision]

Optimizing means making the code better. All the programmers I've talked to have told me that you can generate code, more code than you could ever know what to do with, mountains of code in fact, whatever color of mountain you want - but it's never going to be good code.

Some might tell me they are just in denial about their replacement, but what they're saying sounds totally believable to me, based on the interactions I've had with AI.

Refactoring code usually means developer is bored.

[Fly Swatter]

Sort of like rearranging the chairs on the Titanic.