Older Intel Graphics To Drop From OpenGL 2.1 To 1.4 On Linux

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Older Intel Graphics To Drop From OpenGL 2.1 To 1.4 On Linux

For older Intel i915~i945 graphics hardware, the Linux Mesa driver has exposed OpenGL 2.1 support while under Windows these ~12+ year old integrated graphics have only exposed OpenGL 1.4. Mesa now though might withdraw its OpenGL 2 support by default for older hardware on the i915 driver...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Mesa-i915-OpenGL-2-Drop

[Adarion]

Could someone help me to understand? For now it reads like: there is a flakey implementation of some features needed to advertise OpenGL 2.x - but instead of fixing this we rather drop support altogether and fall down to OpenGL 1.4 so people can throw the hardware away if they want to use a modern DE or anything like that on it.
Can't someone just give love to the elderly hardware?

[sunweb]

WHY? It works atleast for KDE where there is no need for games. In addition to more of a modern hardware i have an old laptop i use occasionally. Now its time to revert from Manjaro KDE spin to Kubuntu again. Damn if i knew it would happen i wouldn't bother installing Manjaro there at all =(

[RussianNeuroMancer]

It works atleast for KDE

As I see OpenGL ES 2 will stay, so KDE 5 will able to use this code-path via variable.

[MoonMoon]

WHY? It works atleast for KDE where there is no need for games. In addition to more of a modern hardware i have an old laptop i use occasionally. Now its time to revert from Manjaro KDE spin to Kubuntu again. Damn if i knew it would happen i wouldn't bother installing Manjaro there at all =(

Why would you do that? The article clearly says that you can enable the extensions again.

[Hi-Angel]

The reasoning for dropping from OpenGL 2.1 to OpenGL 1.4 for i915 is due to Chrome and other applications using really slow code-paths with these newer extensions available

lol I honestly doubt those apps including Chrome does even have support for OpenGL below 2.1. So instead of using slow code paths and GPU it'd end up with slow software rendering without GPU at all.

[schmidtbag]

Maybe, just maybe, if your crappy DDR1 CPU can render faster than your IGP (or render it at all), it's time to upgrade your GPU or entire PC. GPUs are supposed to improve performance, not hinder it.

I'm not against this decision, just people who are, for whatever reason, still using this GPU.

[avph]

<blockquote><p>Maybe, just maybe, if your crappy DDR1 CPU can render faster than your IGP, it's time to upgrade your GPU (or PC in general). GPUs are supposed to improve performance, not hinder it.</p></blockquote> CPU has no idea what dram type it is using. GPU is not located on CPU but on Graphic Memory Controller Hub (gmch) for 915-945 hardware, also called the northbridge. It is not possible to upgrade that part.

[ResponseWriter]

WHY? It works atleast for KDE where there is no need for games. In addition to more of a modern hardware i have an old laptop i use occasionally. Now its time to revert from Manjaro KDE spin to Kubuntu again. Damn if i knew it would happen i wouldn't bother installing Manjaro there at all =(

Edit /etc/pacman.conf and add a line to ignore the mesa packages, then you'll stay on whatever is installed now. Wonder if I may need to do the same, but I use LXQT and I'm not sure it has an OpenGL dependency.

But as others have said, it may be better to lose this and use a codepath which your hardware is actually capable of rather than it being emulated on the CPU.

[Gusar]

there is a flakey implementation of some features needed to advertise OpenGL 2.x - but instead of fixing this we rather drop support altogether and fall down to OpenGL 1.4 so people can throw the hardware away if they want to use a modern DE or anything like that on it.

It's not about a flaky implementation, it's about a software implementation of stuff that the hardware isn't capable of. So there's nothing to fix here, the hardware plain and simple isn't capable. Advertising opengl 2.1 support on this hardware is basically lying to applications that the hardware can do stuff that in reality it can't. That's why the slowness in Chrome, it wants to do stuff that the GPU should be doing in hardware, but with the fake opengl 2.1 support in the i915 driver, Chrome is instead hitting a software path.

BTW, Ubuntu has been using this patch locally for a long time now. Because Unity is hit similarly to Chrome and reverting the driver to opengl 1.4 means that Unity will not show certain effects (the blur effect in particular), but will at least run at a usable speed.

Basically, there's no need for the outrage in this thread, this patch is a *good* thing.