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

[duby229]

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.

Even so, gangs of people -recently- buying computers are going to have to rely upon a legacy mesa, which means over time it will diverge from upstream. And as was pointed out, what about switchable graphics?

I'm not saying this is a bad, but I can imagine several scenario's where commonly occurring breakage will happen. In fact I think this is a great idea, it just screws most GPU's in use on linux right now, but serves Intel right. Intel could have and should have made this transition many years ago.

EDIT: I don't think backporting could happen with the Iris gallium driver due to NIR. But they could resurrect 965g or even start a new TGSI only gallium driver. It has something to do with accessing system RAM that I don't grasp.

[microcode]

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.

Just s/master/classic/ and your workflow is the same.

[ihatemichael]

Just s/master/classic/ and your workflow is the same.

No, I'm not using anything but Mesa master. Rewrite i965 as a gallium driver and then let's talk about removing old drivers.

[Space Heater]

In fact I think this is a great idea, it just screws most GPU's in use on linux right now, but serves Intel right.

How does it "screw" most users? The reality is that Intel hasn't been doing anything but occasional bugfixes for haswell and older for quite a while now. So whether or not it is officially placed in a separate branch does not change the fact that these devices have been in effective maintenance mode for years.

No, I'm not using anything but Mesa master. Rewrite i965 as a gallium driver and then let's talk about removing old drivers.

Could you explain why this is so important for you? What actual difference does it make?

[duby229]

How does it "screw" most users? The reality is that Intel hasn't doing anything but occasional bugfixes for haswell and older for quite a while now. So whether or not it is officially placed in a separate branch does not change the fact that these devices have been in effective maintenance mode for years.


Could you explain why this is so important for you? What actual difference does it make?

I guess, I'll just have to wait and see, but I can imagine several scenarios for common breakage, Old mesa new kernel. switchable graphics, glvnd.... Just to name a few off the top of my head.....

[microcode]

I guess, I'll just have to wait and see, but I can imagine several scenarios for common breakage, Old mesa new kernel. switchable graphics, glvnd.... Just to name a few off the top of my head.....

All of those would apply to classic drivers on single-tree Mesa in precisely the same ways.

[cybertraveler]

Is live switchable graphics working for anyone here? I've never actually got it working myself and never seen it working on someone elses system.

One of my laptops has an Intel GPU and an AMD GPU. If I want to alternate between the GPUs I do it from the bios. I know it's not a solution for everyone because sometimes some outputs are only connected to one of the GPUs.

Live GPU switching or having both running at the same time is a complex topology. I expect for it to work well on GNU/Linux, almost the entire software stack needs to be aware of the topology and know how to handle it. I've noticed that in the Firefox patch notes for Mac, Firefox (a desktop application!) is aware of switchable graphics and there is code in Firefox to ensure the correct GPU is rendering the Firefox window.

[TemplarGR]

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.

So, you can use Ati 7500 from 2000 in Windows 10 just fine? you don't say....