NVIDIA RIVA 128, TNT, and early GeForce framebuffer
Provides framebuffer console and basic 2D output for NVIDIA's earliest consumer 3D graphics cards: the RIVA 128 (1997), RIVA TNT and TNT2, and the first GeForce generations through roughly the GeForce 3 era (2001). Newer NVIDIA chips were handed off to the separate nvidiafb driver, leaving this one as the legacy path for the oldest silicon.
recommendation
Worth keeping but document its niche because the hardware is purely retro at this point. Upstream still gives it light maintenance (a 2024 patch updated it for new backlight power constants), and no removal effort is in flight, so leaving it in mainline costs little while preserving console framebuffer support for collectors and museum systems running these cards.
repository signals
sources
- lore.kernel.org
Upstream still touches rivafb in 2024; a linux-fbdev patch updated rivafb to use backlight power constants.
- cateee.net
LKDDb shows CONFIG_FB_RIVA is still present through 7.0-rc+HEAD and matches legacy NVIDIA PCI IDs including RIVA TNT/TNT2-era devices.
- cateee.net
LKDDb documents that nvidiafb covers TNT and newer, while very old chipsets such as RIVA128 remain on rivafb, indicating rivafb is a legacy split rather than current mainstream support.
- en.wikipedia.org
RIVA 128 was introduced in 1997 and is marked unsupported.
- en.wikipedia.org
GeForce 3 launched in 2001; this is a reasonable upper bound for the 'early GeForce' hardware generation associated with rivafb.
codex reasoning notes (technical)
Lore evidence first: `lore_file_timeline` on `drivers/video/fbdev/riva/fbdev.c` showed exact matches through 2025, and the cited 2024 lore patch is a concrete recent maintenance touch, but I found no removal thread in the allotted budget. Deployment evidence came from web search hits for LKDDb and Wikipedia. Hardware is clearly long-obsolete consumer GPU silicon from 1997-2001, so not sold new in 2025 and only likely to survive in retro/embedded/collector systems. Because upstream still does occasional maintenance and there is no cited removal push, this fits `keep-annotate` rather than `deprecate`/`remove`.