Mesa Developers Discussing Again Whether To Fork Or Drop Non-Gallium3D Drivers

[Shevchen]

To your surprise, Intel has 10% of the graphics market according to steam: https://store.steampowered.com/hwsur...lcome-to-Steam
BTW AMD only has 15% ...

Right, so all the dudes who installed Steam on their laptop to have a quick round of Minecraft are totally comparable to all the people who play Metro Exodus. Totally no difference. And the reason why valve is pushing ACO so much is complelety in vain because nobody needs more than an Intel IGP. Gotcha.

so i need to pay new laptop every 5 years ?
what do you think of me an iphone user ?

No, you should buy a new laptop if you need one. If yours is 10 years old and you are fine with the performance, you don't need a new laptop. But I see a lot of headwind here for old hardware - so I guess I'll just take my points back and wish you having fun playing Doom, Metro, Tomb Raider etc on your IGP, right?

Here is the thing: If you don't play those games, thats fine. But other people do.

[maxtertheturtle]

I think that there's a balance between supporting new and legacy hardware. In this case, Intel and AMD employ developers to work on Mesa. It costs both companies money and developer man-hours to support hardware that no longer generates revenue. While I don't think that hardware should be abandoned immediately after a company moves to the next revision, I think a period of support should be defined. I'm not the person who should define the length of this period, but I think 5 years is a good term. If people still want to use that hardware after that period, it should be left to the community to support it.

[s_j_newbury]

The Intel-Mesa testing lab does actually run automated tests on nearly every GPU going back to 2006, both on new stable releases, daily, and—on the majority of systems—on every push to the repository.

For what little it's worth...here's when various GPUs first came out:

• 2006—Broadwater (Gen4, the original i965)
• ...
• 2012—Ivybridge (Gen7, i965 only)
• 2013—Haswell (Gen7.5, i965 only)
• 2014—Broadwell (Gen8 on Core, supported by both iris and i965)
• 2015—Cherryview/Braswell (Gen8LP on Atom, i965 only)
• 2015—Skylake (Gen9, supported by both iris and i965)
• ...
• 2019—Icelake (Gen11)
• 2020—now

Cherryview is the main anomaly here—iris doesn't support it, and it's 5 years old. But otherwise, the new driver runs on the last 6 years of hardware. Haswell is actually closer to 7 years old at this point.

Admittedly, that's a bit pedantic...and won't likely make anyone feel better. I like my Haswell laptop, and I certainly don't want to drop support for old hardware arbitrarily. I even fixed up Mesa to get some recent games running on Haswell not that long ago, in response to comments here. But, the reality is that in the new driver, my primary focus needs to be on 2019 and 2020+ hardware. There are some pretty exciting things in the works.

The initial release dates are a little misleading since Haswell was last refreshed in 2015, and I'm sure many systems would have been sold after that date.

It's such a shame you (Intel devs) didn't pick up the i965g driver back in the day. Maybe if a community project picked it up and tried porting code from i965 "classic" and sharing where possible with Iris Intel could lend some support to the effort?

[robclark]

Bug fixes in shared code? It *will* bit-rot out of tree. How many out-of-tree Mesa driver drivers are maintained? Overhead and additional system complexity from GLVND?

This is all just justification/rationalization for Intel not supporting 5 year old GEN7.x in their current drivers. It is understandable from a commercial point of view, but really not customer friendly! This is $1000+ hardware, which is already massively depreciated by the numerous security flaws, it's not unreasonable to expect better.

At some point there is a higher risk of breaking support for old hw by not splitting out a legacy/stable branch than there is of accidentally improving support for the old hw by keeping it all in one branch.

[mifritscher]

Btw, there was an older Intel+gallium driver, but was dropped november 2011.

[IreMinMon]

And here I am, a filthy pleb running a Haswell system and holding back progress and innovation.
We shall, as always, surrender our fates willfully into the hands of our enlightened Jacobin overlords at Intel. They would know what's best for us.

[Panda_Wrist]

The Intel-Mesa testing lab does actually run automated tests on nearly every GPU going back to 2006, both on new stable releases, daily, and—on the majority of systems—on every push to the repository.

For what little it's worth...here's when various GPUs first came out:

• 2006—Broadwater (Gen4, the original i965)
• ...
• 2012—Ivybridge (Gen7, i965 only)
• 2013—Haswell (Gen7.5, i965 only)
• 2014—Broadwell (Gen8 on Core, supported by both iris and i965)
• 2015—Cherryview/Braswell (Gen8LP on Atom, i965 only)
• 2015—Skylake (Gen9, supported by both iris and i965)
• ...
• 2019—Icelake (Gen11)
• 2020—now

Cherryview is the main anomaly here—iris doesn't support it, and it's 5 years old. But otherwise, the new driver runs on the last 6 years of hardware. Haswell is actually closer to 7 years old at this point.

Admittedly, that's a bit pedantic...and won't likely make anyone feel better. I like my Haswell laptop, and I certainly don't want to drop support for old hardware arbitrarily. I even fixed up Mesa to get some recent games running on Haswell not that long ago, in response to comments here. But, the reality is that in the new driver, my primary focus needs to be on 2019 and 2020+ hardware. There are some pretty exciting things in the works.

Hey, that was me that you helped out! Thanks again for that.

I have mixed feelings about this. The i965 driver is doing great for my *cough* "Iris" *cough* Pro 5200. It manages to do everything that I expect it to do. But taking it out of the main mesa means, it pretty much won't get looked at anymore besides for minor bug fixes. Which is sad. Right now having both drivers supported the i965 always has a chance of getting small improvements for this "old" hardware.

Though my main concern is the vulkan driver. Seems like Intel wants to only support broadwell and newer. It would be very sad for them say the haswell/ivy bridge code is holding it back and get rid of it too. Vulkan may be "incomplete" on that hardware, but does a great job. I use vulkan for mpv and retroarch and play many of the games that i like (jrpgs mostly) with dxvk. Though of course nothing has been said about that, it just worries me a bit.

[Mark Rose]

I regularly use an Ivy Bridge and a Haswell laptop. I almost never game on them, but I see myself using them both for another year or two.

[agd5f]

The drivers are all open source. Anyone is free to step up and write a new driver or help maintain the code, etc. It's supposed to be an open source community.

[Guest]

I think that there's a balance between supporting new and legacy hardware. In this case, Intel and AMD employ developers to work on Mesa. It costs both companies money and developer man-hours to support hardware that no longer generates revenue. While I don't think that hardware should be abandoned immediately after a company moves to the next revision, I think a period of support should be defined. I'm not the person who should define the length of this period, but I think 5 years is a good term. If people still want to use that hardware after that period, it should be left to the community to support it.

GPUs can be fast enough 10 years after release if not more. I had no issues playing Devil Daggers on a 9600 M GT, both with nouveau and proprietary drivers, which is a game that's like 8 years newer than the GPU. 5 years isn't really enough if you aren't interested in latest games, that GPU could even do OpenCL with proprietary drivers and a compatibility layer over CUDA.