This is one issue monolithic kernels have unfortunately. Even if you moved the drivers out of tree, you have the issue of the constantly changing kernel API.
These are 20+ year old GPUs though. How many people out there are seriously using an ATI Rage with Linux Kernel 6.0+? There isn't even a Windows Vista ATI Rage driver.
I've seen enough edge cases of "let me run the latest kernel on a Thinkpad T22 for shits" to not understand why to disturb these things unless it frees up a significant amount of space or resources or had some deep bleeding security vuln in them.
That and I wouldn't be surprised if some old VIA integrated systems are still running embedded / industrial applications and would prefer the latest drivers just to maintain the basic security of whatever they are running (eg power plant infrastructure). Seems unnecessary to cut such systems off like that.
I still have one out in the garage in my bin of vintage graphics cards. This card came in my mom's IBM desktop in the 90s. But yeah, lots of old hardware that was amazing in it's prime is completely obsolete and unworkable with current gen operating systems.
Sound cards seem like a unique case considering the broader agelessness of audio hardware post-ac97. After all, you can still buy modern motherboards like the Asus B550m-C/CSM with full PCI slots on them.
ATi Rage128 and Matrox MG200 survived for surprising amount of time in servers and server BMCs, with occasional side use case for Matrox in large multiple display setups for 2D.
The code will always exist in the history, should anyone get a bug up their ass and want to port one of these drivers to a modern kernel (and implicitly become the maintainer).
Would it even be possible to get the userspace drivers for these cards working with a kernel this new? Wouldn't you need to compile a really old version of mesa? In that case I'd imagine you'd need all your libraries and programs to be from 20 years ago as well.
GPU support doesn’t bother me as much as CPU support. For GPUs, if it isn’t modern enough it’s effectively useless for most people beyond VGA/SVGA output. Modern user space requires modern GPUs.
Here's an example of his forum posts from 2000 related to working on some of these drivers: https://web.archive.org/web/20000816145733/http://lists.sour...
Poke around here for more:
https://web.archive.org/web/20000815084204/http://lists.sour...
https://web.archive.org/web/20001019083125/http://utah-glx.s...