At a time when Linux continues dropping older hardware drivers due to the influx of AI/LLM-generated bug reports and patches for hardware extremely unlikely to be used with modern versions of the mainline Linux kernel, Voodoo graphics cards and vintage Atari computers are seeing some reprieve with the upcoming Linux 7.3 kernel release.

The frame-buffer device "FBDEV" subsystem updates were submitted and since merged today for the Linux 7.3 kernel. When it comes to the Voodoo 3 / 4 / 5 graphics card support, the TDFXFB driver now has the ability to initialize these Voodoo cards without PC-BIOS. Open-source developer Daniel Palmer pursued this work to allow "unbooted" Voodoo cards to work on Linux where the hardware was never brought up by the video BIOS. This is primarily useful for non-x86 computers.

The TDFXFB driver is using values obtained from the video BIOS directly in order to bring up this support for having the driver to be able to initialize the hardware itself and bring it up to a similar state that is normally done by the vBIOS.

Claude Fable 5 assisted in debugging this support. This support has been tested both on an x86_64 system and on an Amiga 4000 with a mediator PCI bridge. These patches have been tested with some yet-to-be-merged patches for supporting 3D rendering too and all functionality appears to be working.

Separately, with this FBDEV pull request, it also enhances Atari computer support with the ATAFB frame-buffer driver. The new code adds additional video bit depths plus also adds support for SuperVidel's SuperBlitter. The additional depths are 8-bit chunky, 16-bit
RGB565, and ARGB888. The SuperVidel SuperBlitter was a hardware co-processor upgrade for Atari Falcon computers for faster screen drawing and pixel operations.

This pull landed those Voodoo 3 / 4 / 5 and vintage Atari improvements along with various FBDEV fixes and code clean-ups.