AI finally does something useful: helping keep old Radeon drivers alive
Mesa’s R600 driver gets code cleanup for Radeon HD 2000 to HD 6000 GPUs
Phoronix reports that Mesa’s AMD R600 Gallium3D driver has received 59 commits for Mesa 26.2. The driver supports Radeon HD 2000 through Radeon HD 6000 graphics cards, covering hardware that goes back to the Radeon HD 2900 XT from 2007.
The patches were submitted by Gert Wollny, one of the few developers still working on the R600g driver. The update focuses on refactoring shader compiler code and other cleanup work. This is not a new feature update for modern Radeon GPUs, but maintenance work for legacy hardware that still depends on Mesa.
AI at useful work
According to the merge request, Copilot was used during this cleanup work. Wollny wrote that the series “ does a lot of refactoring to make the sfn shader compiler code a bit cleaner ,” and added that “the refactoring was done with the help of Copilot (auto mode).” Individual commits also mark Copilot as assisting with the changes.
Source: Phoronix
That is probably one of the better use cases for AI coding tools. The R600 driver supports GPUs that are rarely used today, and AMD no longer maintains these products in its current driver stack. Yet the hardware still exists in retro PCs, Linux test systems, and older machines where open-source support can extend usability.
Source: Phoronix
