Crocus: Working On Gallium3D For Old Intel Graphics

[Hi-Angel]

This was interesting to read. Do you have any references to discussion about that firmware problem and Iris decision not to support it? I'd like to read more about it.

This is not as straight forwards as you will think Leopard. Early Iris driver use to work with 7Gen and newer as in Ivy Bridge and newer. Current one will work with some Intel boards with Ivybridge and haswell but this is due to firmware. Odds of you having one of those boards is slim. But since Iris will work with Gen 7 and newer hardware under very particular conditions exposing all hardware features this does mean the Crocus work should absolute be able to make it work without those exact conditions.

I cannot remember the exactly opengl feature that broken Iris from working on Gen 7 Ivy Bridge without a firmware workaround but it was also decided back then not to fix problem in general firmware or the Iris general driver because what is going classic driver now was supporting the hardware well enough back then. Hindsight from today says it was a bad choice. Back then it look like good optimisation of resources.

So the statement that doesn't/cannot run with Iris is wrong. Ivy Bridge and Haswell can but the odds of you having a right motherboard with the right firmware so it will work is insanely slim to the point that winning the loto may be more likely. We are talking the intel branded reference motherboards here for embedded hardware developers there are insanely rare motherboards because not a lot of them were made and then if you find one you need the right firmware version on it. At least in this rare case that it will work makes the Crocus work back to at gen 7 absolutely possible without question as it been possible to try out how that hardware would behave with a Iris driver for those with the rare hardware.

[m1kemex]

As an owner of a Thinkpad X301 (Core 2 Duo with GMA 4500 MHD), I felt an obligation to point out that this discussion is getting way too technical.

Nobody is going to game on such an old hardware. We, owners and users of this kind of stuff, just want to keep using it with new software. And I think it's fair to expect just the same level of performance as when it was brand new.

That isn't possible when software developers start to draw imaginary lines. Over 10 years ago, someone at intel decided not to build a proper OpenGL 3.x driver for this chip, even though the hardware supports the functions (being a DX10 chip). For that arbitrary decision, you can't activate hardware acceleration in Firefox and many other programs.

That's it. All I want is to keep running the latest Firefox release on my X301 machine, and get exactly the level of performance it's supposed to have. But I won't have that if the Linux developers adopt the same mentality of intel. Without hardware acceleration this machine feels much slower than it really is. And believe it or not, with a 400GB SSD and 8GB of RAM, this is pretty much all you really need for your basic tasks.

P. S. My Thinkpad X301 was the most expensive laptop Lenovo sold at the time. Performance may not seem impressive, but build quality quality is. Carbon fiber cover, magnesium base, a keyboard that makes anything more recent look like crap... whoever says this is plain oatmeal speaks from ignorance.