I would really like to see the r300 code not get its own driver. Unified drivers are a good thing, and radeon/r200 is bad enough. Unfortunately I don't know a good way to make sure they don't diverge more than they already have. I think the current development method is working fine for now, but that the end goal should be to fold the r300 code back into r200.
The second big reason is that we cannot simply include Mesa driver alone - it would have to be accompanied by changes to the DRM driver. R300 DRM driver is stabilized as far as experimental development is concerned, but it is far from perfect from security standpoint (we basically allow almost arbitrary commands as we did not know what we would need when we started).
Here again, ideally this would get folded upstream too, once it's at least secure.
I can't really mandate a policy since I haven't been contributing much to r300, but I would like to hear how people think this should progress.
I'm not so convinced that r200 and r300 driver (and radeon, for that matter) really should be only one driver. Why is it that bad to have 3 drivers? Those chips just ARE different. Sure, the 2d parts are more or less identical and certainly should be only one driver, but that's already the case. DRM should probably be the same too, since the differences needed are pretty much limited to what packets it accepts.
But I'm not exactly sure how you'd unify the dri code. While you cannot deny that the drivers indeed look very similar, there are still a lot of differences. You will inevitably end up with lots of "if Radeon do that, else" code (or did you have #ifdef's in mind, so you would share the same source files, but would compile it to 3 targets in the end?).
So you might be able to unify them, but I'd bet it won't look pretty.
Of course, it depends on how dissimilar the chips actually are. IMHO the differences between radeon and r200 are too big to make unifying worthwile, I have only looked at the r300 driver briefly but the differences to r200 seem to be quite large too.
As a side note, last time I checked ATI had 3 Direct3d drivers for the chips too. They have a unified package to install, and they may (no idea) share large parts of source code, but there are 3 distinct dlls in the end.
Roland
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