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In brief: Developers have recently started removing old devices and peripherals from the list of Linux-supported hardware, because AI is letting script kiddies discover too many bugs to make one-man maintenance tasks practical. However, the very same AI can also prove useful for letting ancient cards "talk" with the kernel even when hardware support is just not there.
A series of new patches is improving support for 3dfx Voodoo3 cards in Linux. Daniel Palmer, the developer behind the code contribution, designed an AI-assisted solution to let the open-source kernel initialize the video cards even on machines with no standard BIOS on the motherboard. The code would make Linux and Voodoo3 coexist on the Amiga and other non-PC machines, but Palmer is also working on 3D acceleration and Voodoo3 emulation through the QEMU virtualization platform.
The new code is going to be part of the Tdfxfb Voodoo driver in Linux 7.3. The upcoming kernel release will include the ability to "see" Voodoo3 cards that still lie in an "unbooted" state, which can occur on systems where the main BIOS is not designed to initialize the video card and start a frame buffer to bring the video signal to the screen.
