The Current State Of The Intel "Crocus" Gallium3D Driver

[Leopard]

Why is this a forked driver and not part of Iris? Are the architecture too different to have them in one driver?

Because Intel devs are not working on Crocus at any capacity, so they just wanted Broadwell and newer to have Iris.

Crocus is a community effort.

Main dev working on it is a Red Hat employee, other one is an ex (?) Nouveau dev.

That is why it is not upstream. Intel didn't want to work on/bother with those older gen gpu's initially.

Which in result you actually got a very inferior experience on Linux with some of those gpu's compared to Windows. With Ironlake for example.

Those gpu's supports D3D10 on Windows but stuck at GL 2.1 on Linux which GL 2.1 is not counter part of D3D10 feature wise.

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTMxMDQ

[ms178]

I hope Crocus will be as feature rich and at least as fast as the classic driver, that would extend the usefulness of my Sandy Bridge laptop quite a bit. But that would mean OpenGL 3.3 support. Hopefully they will test it well, I don't want to see stability suffering from this move either. But at least Sandy Bridge doesn't seem to be the focus for now, at least from Dave's blog post it reads that it is the least tested of all.

[geearf]

Why is this a forked driver and not part of Iris? Are the architecture too different to have them in one driver?

[MadCatX]

If only Intel went with Gallium3D from the get go instead of arguing that it is too complicated and slow. Now we will end up with yet another community developed driver for HW that is still widely used.

[phoronix]

Phoronix: The Current State Of The Intel "Crocus" Gallium3D Driver

The Intel "Crocus" Gallium3D driver in development for supporting old Intel i965 IGPs through Haswell continues making progress by the upstream, open-source Mesa3D community for hopefully one day replacing Intel's classic "i965" Mesa driver...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Intel-Crocus-April-2021-State