ATI Mach64 and early Radeon framebuffer support
Framebuffer console and basic 2D acceleration support for ATI's Mach64 graphics chips from the 1990s and the original Radeon R100-era GPUs sold roughly 2000 through 2003. These cards shipped in countless desktops and PowerPC Macs of that era and are still occasionally found in retro workstations and older servers used as serial/console boxes.
recommendation
Worth keeping but flagging as legacy because the hardware has not been sold new for over two decades, yet the code still attracts genuine upstream attention: a targeted atyfb bug fix landed in October 2025 and radeonfb received modernization touches in late 2024. There is no removal discussion in flight, so users booting old ATI-equipped machines on modern kernels still benefit, but distros can reasonably treat it as a legacy module rather than a mainstream graphics path.
repository signals
sources
- lore.kernel.org
atyfb still receives targeted upstream fixes; a non-treewide bug fix was posted in October 2025.
- lore.kernel.org
Recent lore traffic includes cleanup-only atyfb changes, indicating maintenance rather than a removal series.
- lore.kernel.org
radeonfb in this directory also still sees maintenance touches, though mostly small modernizations.
- en.wikipedia.org
Mach64 is a 1990s ATI graphics family, consistent with legacy-only deployment today.
- en.wikipedia.org
The earliest Radeon generation covered here dates to 2000-2003 era products, implying no new-hardware sales in 2025.
codex reasoning notes (technical)
Local shell inspection of drivers/video/fbdev/Kconfig shows this directory covers FB_ATY (ATI Mach64) and FB_RADEON (ATI Radeon framebuffer), i.e. very old ATI GPUs. lore_file_timeline on atyfb_base.c and radeon_base.c showed real upstream attention through 2024-2026, including a 2025 atyfb bug fix and a 2026 cleanup, but no clear removal discussion; the attempted lore_regex removal scan timed out once and was not retried. Web search (Wikipedia pages obtained via web search results) places Mach64 in the 1990s and the Radeon R100 family around 2000-2003, so hardware is obsolete and not sold new in 2025. Because upstream still sees occasional bug-fix/cleanup traffic, this is better tagged as legacy/annotate than deprecated-for-removal.