Crocus: Working On Gallium3D For Old Intel Graphics

[Adarion]

MDA, Hercules Monochrome is vintage. CGA, too. Okay, maybe EGA.
But I welcome support for old HW. Often enough there is low power HW that is still fine enough "for the purpose" so let's have support.

And as otheres here said, a lot of that stuff was sold and is still around.

[oiaohm]

For people who says "what is the point?" , there is a possibility of Gallium 9 usage with those gpu's on Crocus.

1-) They don't have Vulkan support so they can't use DXVK.

2-) WineD3D is not good.

With Gallium 9 those gpu's comes to a really sweet point with d3d9 games where they have never there before.

Even for games Gallium 9 on the old intel GPU is limited remember they were not great for directly with windows for gaming.

For you non gaming use cases WineD3D with Dx10 and Dx11 applications lot cases is good enough. Yes the use cases where 5 frames per second is good enough.

There is something else as well. Out of all the intel iGPU made only the Westmere January 7, 2010 and Sandy Bridge 2011 don't have vulkan under Linux. So the pool that cannot use DXVK is in fact quite small. Yes there is a large area of Vulkan 1.0 on Linux that if you are on windows you don't have Vulkan at all.

There are 6 families of intel gpus with Vulkan 1.0 support under Linux. Windows unless the intel GPU can do Vulkan 1.2 it does not have Vulkan support.
2012 Intel igpus have Vulkan 1.0 support with Linux with Windows users having to have a 2015 igpu to get any Vulkan support. Yes its really simple mistake to think that missing Vulkan support is true for i965 for early models because this is true under windows. This is one of the cases where Windows and Linux is different.

i965 driver does not cover the non vulkan. Its the i915 that is the non vulkan on Linux. So Crocus is not covering the areas that DXVK or WineD3D vulkan work cannot be used. Of course that does not mean DXVK stuck to Vulkan 1.0 is going to be happy or the best performing.

Mind you it does cause a interesting problem when a Windows Vulkan application in wine ends up being given Vulkan 1.0 only as they kind of not expecting that. There are some quite funny reported bugs against wine that people could not reproduce for a long time until someone woke up the problem was Vulkan version. So its not only dxvk that will have a what the moment being given only Vulkan 1.0.

Both are valid points, but it still begs the question:
Who was asking for this today? Even if this were done 5 years ago, it'd be rather late to get started.
Obviously, there will be some people using this - I don't doubt that. But this isn't put together by some random hobbyist.

Pre Gallium drivers are not optimised for GBM and DMA BUF as wayland compositors are going to be using going forwards. Note I am not saying that it will not work just will not be as performance as you expect.

raun0 mentioned the 100 million sold in 2014 depends on the usage. Some of those deployed into control systems and other items like it are going to be in usage 15 years after sale by civil infrastructure.

https://www.cip-project.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/17/2018/10/CIP_Whitepaper_10.19.18.pdf

Home users think of a PC having a 5 to 10 year life span. I am sorry when you come to civil infrastructure items have a 15+ year life span. But there requirements is gamer grade graphics. When I say 15+ it could be 30 to 40 years in deployment. Cost cutting and compactness requirements of civil infrastructure means integrated graphics is popular. So there are some parties who will be wanting to look after systems with igpu for another 10+ years at least.

[Leopard]

Each of the devs involved in this are renowned chefs. All the more reason why it's weird they're making cold plain oatmeal.



Both are valid points, but it still begs the question:
Who was asking for this today? Even if this were done 5 years ago, it'd be rather late to get started.
Obviously, there will be some people using this - I don't doubt that. But this isn't put together by some random hobbyist.

I ask for this. Because i rather prefer using an upstream driver that will potentially get attention rather than a known to be working but completely abandoned,stalled one.

Like how/why people wants to use Wayland even on NV hw.

Is that a net improvement compared to X? Hard to say "yes"

Is there an interest on fixing X issues/getting new releases upstream? No

So that is why Wayland is an improvement,Crocus also falls into same category imo.

[oiaohm]

I ask for this. Because i rather prefer using an upstream driver that will potentially get attention rather than a known to be working but completely abandoned,stalled one.

This is only part of the story. If Crocus did not develop you could expect people on platforms covered by the i956 classic driver to be forked to use zink. Do note the i956 have vulkan 1.0 Why is that zink will have higher opengl version than the classic driver i956 has.

Gallium has advantages with drivers of sharing cpu emulation features between drivers. As in X gpu does not have X feature we need to CPU emulate it. The classic drivers in this department are special snowflakes. As in there is no common design to be able to share development between drivers. Yes the big thing about Gallium is the common design.

I can see long term maintenance reason to split the classic drivers out and progressively work on replacing the classic drivers that parties still wish on using. Its not like there is a unlimited budgets for GPU driver development. Special snowflake design drivers are a lot more work to maintain than most would think.

People forgot drivers can be broken by compiler updates. This means if you are not regularly testing the code you can turn around and find it does not work any more. This is the reason why the more you can share code in items like graphics drivers the better as this results in the code being tested more often.

Form my point of view splitting special snowflake design drivers away from the common shared design drivers that the Gallium ones are is a good thing this opens up space for items like Crocus to upstream without having to fight with if they are better/worse than the special snowflake driver.

[antonyshen]

I have two Haswell i7 PC/laptop, still being capable and OK machines for daily use, really looking forward to see Crocus landed for future Mesa support!!

[Leopard]

Even for games Gallium 9 on the old intel GPU is limited remember they were not great for directly with windows for gaming.

For you non gaming use cases WineD3D with Dx10 and Dx11 applications lot cases is good enough. Yes the use cases where 5 frames per second is good enough.

There is something else as well. Out of all the intel iGPU made only the Westmere January 7, 2010 and Sandy Bridge 2011 don't have vulkan under Linux. So the pool that cannot use DXVK is in fact quite small. Yes there is a large area of Vulkan 1.0 on Linux that if you are on windows you don't have Vulkan at all.

There are 6 families of intel gpus with Vulkan 1.0 support under Linux. Windows unless the intel GPU can do Vulkan 1.2 it does not have Vulkan support.
2012 Intel igpus have Vulkan 1.0 support with Linux with Windows users having to have a 2015 igpu to get any Vulkan support. Yes its really simple mistake to think that missing Vulkan support is true for i965 for early models because this is true under windows. This is one of the cases where Windows and Linux is different.

i965 driver does not cover the non vulkan. Its the i915 that is the non vulkan on Linux. So Crocus is not covering the areas that DXVK or WineD3D vulkan work cannot be used. Of course that does not mean DXVK stuck to Vulkan 1.0 is going to be happy or the best performing.

Mind you it does cause a interesting problem when a Windows Vulkan application in wine ends up being given Vulkan 1.0 only as they kind of not expecting that. There are some quite funny reported bugs against wine that people could not reproduce for a long time until someone woke up the problem was Vulkan version. So its not only dxvk that will have a what the moment being given only Vulkan 1.0.



Pre Gallium drivers are not optimised for GBM and DMA BUF as wayland compositors are going to be using going forwards. Note I am not saying that it will not work just will not be as performance as you expect.

raun0 mentioned the 100 million sold in 2014 depends on the usage. Some of those deployed into control systems and other items like it are going to be in usage 15 years after sale by civil infrastructure.

https://www.cip-project.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/17/2018/10/CIP_Whitepaper_10.19.18.pdf

Home users think of a PC having a 5 to 10 year life span. I am sorry when you come to civil infrastructure items have a 15+ year life span. But there requirements is gamer grade graphics. When I say 15+ it could be 30 to 40 years in deployment. Cost cutting and compactness requirements of civil infrastructure means integrated graphics is popular. So there are some parties who will be wanting to look after systems with igpu for another 10+ years at least.

No.

When i first moved to Linux i was on a laptop that has Ironlake igpu, i5 480M cpu.

I was able to play Medieval 2 Total War ( i still play it on a GTX 1050 Optimus laptop) on Windows with all low settings at close to 30 FPS ( since that is a strategy game high fps is not entirely needed) , but on Linux i faced two problems with it.

1-) Native Feral port of this game needs GL 3 , but that gpu got stuck at GL 2.1. So i wasn't able to run it.
2-) Windows version of it didn't work with Wine but even if it did probably i would be getting like 5 fps or so with probably broken graphics.

So while most users won't care about this aspect, users and use cases like this exist.

Which i have seen couple of setups on Proton Github tracker where people were not having good times with Wined3d with those hardware. Slow+broken

[kbios]

Is this based on the "ilo" driver that existed a few years ago?

[Leopard]

This is only part of the story. If Crocus did not develop you could expect people on platforms covered by the i956 classic driver to be forked to use zink. Do note the i956 have vulkan 1.0 Why is that zink will have higher opengl version than the classic driver i956 has.

Gallium has advantages with drivers of sharing cpu emulation features between drivers. As in X gpu does not have X feature we need to CPU emulate it. The classic drivers in this department are special snowflakes. As in there is no common design to be able to share development between drivers. Yes the big thing about Gallium is the common design.

I can see long term maintenance reason to split the classic drivers out and progressively work on replacing the classic drivers that parties still wish on using. Its not like there is a unlimited budgets for GPU driver development. Special snowflake design drivers are a lot more work to maintain than most would think.

People forgot drivers can be broken by compiler updates. This means if you are not regularly testing the code you can turn around and find it does not work any more. This is the reason why the more you can share code in items like graphics drivers the better as this results in the code being tested more often.

Form my point of view splitting special snowflake design drivers away from the common shared design drivers that the Gallium ones are is a good thing this opens up space for items like Crocus to upstream without having to fight with if they are better/worse than the special snowflake driver.

Only Haswell has Vulkan support amongst gpu's that will be moved to Crocus. Others doesn't. What even is your point?

[Hi-Angel]

Even for games Gallium 9 on the old intel GPU is limited remember they were not great for directly with windows for gaming.

For you non gaming use cases WineD3D with Dx10 and Dx11 applications lot cases is good enough. Yes the use cases where 5 frames per second is good enough.

My gf has MacBook 2013 with Fedora and Intel Graphics HD 5000. It seems to be 5th generation…? Anyway, it's not supported by Iris. But for casual gaming it works well enough. We play sometimes "Divinity: Original Sin" on LAN and also rarely some other games. Yeah, it's a weak GPU but there are games that run well on it. So, it's not like using it prevents us from gaming.

People forgot drivers can be broken by compiler updates. This means if you are not regularly testing the code you can turn around and find it does not work any more.

So, I'm not opposing, but just wanted to clarify. Here, unless we are talking about a compiler bug (which would affect many other applications, not just drivers), the case where software broke after being rebuilt with newer compiler implies there was a bug in the software. It likely means software had some kind of undefined behavior that simply haven't got triggered before.

With that said, I think that for previously very active software that slowly entered a maintenance mode (which I'd think implicitly happened with those older drivers because contributions to them become shallower with time), and was through its history built by dozens of various compilers (specifically, various versions of GCC and Clang), possibility of such bug is very low.

[oiaohm]

Only Haswell has Vulkan support amongst gpu's that will be moved to Crocus. Others doesn't. What even is your point?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Graphics_Technology#Capabilities_(GPU_hardware)

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pa...sa-12-released
That in fact wrong. Its Ivy Bridge and newer that has Vulkan 1.0 support with Intel. Crocus is 7th gen and newer targeting and that Ivy Bridge. Everything Crocus is targeting has Vulkan support. Not to say the old vulkan support for Ivy Bridge could not be improved but the support is there.

The ones that don't have vulkan at all Westmere 5.5gen and Sandy Bridge 6 gen these are the i915 driver.