Mesa Devs Discuss Potentially Dropping Non-Gallium Drivers Or Forking Code For Gallium

[Luke_Wolf]

yeah, try use anything not last years on Linux, my ATI Radeon 7500 in a G4 Cube, Matrox, Kyro, ... everything not loved by the big distribution guys get's broken and left behind.

> "try use anything not last years"
> Points to examples of ancient hardware that in the best case only support OpenGL 1.2, at worst don't have any hardware acceleration



The actual cards of last year work just fine, as do the cards of the year before and the year before that. The Ivy Bridge Thinkpad I have continues to work fine, as do all of the AMD GCN cards I've owned over the years. I further imagine that if I plugged in the old Evergreen cards that they would work fine too. Anything from AMD or Intel that even bears a resemblance of being relevant is fine, and Nvidia's proprietary driver looks like it supports everything back to the GTX 600 series for their mainline driver. So...

[duby229]

> "try use anything not last years"
> Points to examples of ancient hardware that in the best case only support OpenGL 1.2, at worst don't have any hardware acceleration

The actual cards of last year work just fine, as do the cards of the year before and the year before that. The Ivy Bridge Thinkpad I have continues to work fine, as do all of the AMD GCN cards I've owned over the years. I further imagine that if I plugged in the old Evergreen cards that they would work fine too. Anything from AMD or Intel that even bears a resemblance of being relevant is fine, and Nvidia's proprietary driver looks like it supports everything back to the GTX 600 series for their mainline driver. So...

I think the point was that if this change is really made then everything using i965 and i915 will break on every mesa release. So yeah, pretty much everything Intel has up to last year. Obviously he wasn't talking about AMD because their hardware drivers are gallium going all the way back to r300 and not talking about nVidia because they don't use mesa at all. The only drivers he could have been talking about is Intel, which everything he said would in fact be true up till very recent hardware and would in fact be comparable to the current situation with ancient hardware we have now.

It is kinda fair, i mean once this change is made most Intel GPU's (including -very- recent ones) will be in exactly the same boat that ATi 7500 he mentioned is already currently in. (Probably something like 70% of all GPU's used on linux. Oh well, It's Intel's own damn fault. They deserve to bite that bullet)

EDIT: I don't remember the details, but I do in fact remember that Gallium itself was developed on a 965g gallium driver, Intel had every opportunity to make this transition well before AMD did. This situation really is their own damn fault for not doing this years ago.

[pal666]

Is Gallium3D still relevant with Vulkan and SPIR-V?

it will always be relevant, since you aren't going to rewrite every opengl game

Now there is OpenGL over Vulkan, Direct3D over Vulkan

those are fallbacks for poor people without native drivers. native gallium will always be faster than several layers of mismatched abstractions

, etc. Maybe OpenCL over Vulkan? There is now also Vulkan Compute.
There is generic mode setting, there is GLAMOR.
What use does Gallium3D serve?

speed

[pal666]

Dropping working drivers for old hardware that still works is fucking moronic.

What the hell is wrong with you people, this is not Windows.

what the hell is wrong with you, this is opensource, pick your old mesa release and live happy

[zwastik]

i965 are 2014 macbooks. Still used in production environments (I know because I'm in this case). Nowadays the hardware renewal is 5+ years.
And as a matter of fact a 10 year old desktop with an r600 GPU is still my main home dev machine... Hardware simply ages well these days.

I am using Intel 2nd Generation Core Processor (from lspci) it's a mobile Sandy Bridge if I am no mistaken. Anyway, it works really well for all my use cases. Also, my i5 2500k pc is still rocking and doesn't let me down, it just works. Finally, I am in the process of reviving a Athlon XP-M 2500 with a ATI 9600PRO; It will probably become a router for my house network. ~6 years ago it was my retro gaming machine with winxp and lots of games

[duby229]

I am using Intel 2nd Generation Core Processor (from lspci) it's a mobile Sandy Bridge if I am no mistaken. Anyway, it works really well for all my use cases. Also, my i5 2500k pc is still rocking and doesn't let me down, it just works. Finally, I am in the process of reviving a Athlon XP-M 2500 with a ATI 9600PRO; It will probably become a router for my house network. ~6 years ago it was my retro gaming machine with winxp and lots of games

funnily enough, that 9600pro has gallium drivers so it will be unaffected.

[cybertraveler]

Two of my main systems use the i965 driver. It's a brilliant driver for my purposes.

I like what microcode suggested. Maintain two versions of Mesa. Let the non-Gallium Mesa be the home of i965 and other popular old non-Gallium drivers. Let the Gallium Mesa be Gallium land where the vast majority of dev time goes.

The "non-Gallium Mesa" could even be stripped down of code related to hardware which is supported via Gallium Mesa making it light weight.

[ihatemichael]

I believe you misunderstood the proposal. These non-Gallium drivers will not be dropped and disappear, but will live on maintenance mode on a different branch of Mesa. They will be available on your preferred distro, just like today.

I didn't misunderstood anything, I don't want different branch, I should be able to clone the latest Mesa master, compile it and use it on my old hardware just fine.

You don't see the Linux kernel dropping old hardware support or moving old drivers to another branch when something new comes along. Why do this with Mesa?

This talk about "let's remove old drivers from the source tree" is something I would expect from amateurish projects, not Mesa. I can't believe it's even mentioned.

[Luke_Wolf]

I think the point was that if this change is really made then everything using i965 and i915 will break on every mesa release. So yeah, pretty much everything Intel has up to last year. Obviously he wasn't talking about AMD because their hardware drivers are gallium going all the way back to r300 and not talking about nVidia because they don't use mesa at all. The only drivers he could have been talking about is Intel, which everything he said would in fact be true up till very recent hardware and would in fact be comparable to the current situation with ancient hardware we have now.

It is kinda fair, i mean once this change is made most Intel GPU's (including -very- recent ones) will be in exactly the same boat that ATi 7500 he mentioned is already currently in. (Probably something like 70% of all GPU's used on linux. Oh well, It's Intel's own damn fault. They deserve to bite that bullet)

EDIT: I don't remember the details, but I do in fact remember that Gallium itself was developed on a 965g gallium driver, Intel had every opportunity to make this transition well before AMD did. This situation really is their own damn fault for not doing this years ago.

Please reread the thread. What you're saying is literally the opposite of the purpose of this proposal. Classic drivers would be kicked out to a "legacy" branch and distributions would then ship a Mesa-Classic and a Mesa-Gallium which is doable because of glvnd, and Mesa-Classic would just be stuck in maintenance mode, and thus not breaking. In an ideal world Intel would eventually backport pre-Broadwell over to gallium but whatever the internal politics (the "technical reasons" were pure nonsense as you correctly point out in your edit) are that made them stick with Classic drivers are unlikely to have been resolved by them shifting Broadwell over, and so it's likely going to have to be someone outside of Intel that eventually does that work, whether that's Valve, Red Hat, or Google.

Edit: TBH I wouldn't be surprised if Marek's purpose in all of this was really to kick Intel in the pants about locking gallium to Broadwell and later, and to get them to try to backport.

[mzs.112000]

I've got Haswell integrated graphics(HD 4600), and yet, I still benefit from having an up-to-date/non-frozen Mesa. This same laptop *also* has an AMD 8970M, which presumably, is a Gallium-supported card. I'm going to guess that I can't have both versions of Mesa installed at the same time, so switchable graphics is going to end-up worse than it already is.

Many people are probably going to have to end-up either throwing out perfectly good hardware(my computer seems to be perfectly nice for light gaming, all my games run at 60FPS, yet now it won't be supported), or will go back to WIndows or MacOS(where there is no Gallium vs DRI mumbo-jumbo).