Crocus Gallium3D Adds Experimental Intel Gen8 Graphics, Overlapping With Iris Driver

Landing in mainline Mesa 21.2 development code last week was the "Crocus" Gallium3D driver for old Intel hardware spanning from the Intel 965 chipset days "Gen4" up through Crocus supporting Haswell "Gen7" graphics. The i965 to Haswell span has been the focus since the official Intel "Iris" Gallium3D driver already in Mesa supports the Broadwell "Gen8" up through all current Intel UHD/Xe Graphics. But now Crocus with the latest Mesa code has added Gen8 support.

Merged on Tuesday was extending the Crocus Gallium3D driver so it supports Gen8 graphics rather than ending at Haswell/Gen7. The focus of that Gen8 support is for the Intel Cherryview hardware that's still out there.

But this newly-added Gen8 code can also work for Broadwell too, when setting the CROCUS_GEN8=1 environment variable. By default for non-Cherryview Gen8 graphics hardware the Crocus Gallium3D driver will not be used but rather the official Intel Iris Gallium3D driver.

The Broadwell support in Crocus appears to be primarily for debugging purposes but will be fun to benchmark Crocus vs. Iris vs. i965 for this one generation of Intel graphics where there is this driver overlap.