Crocus Gallium3D Nears Mainline Mesa For Gallium3D i965 Through Haswell Graphics

A few months ago you may recall word of Crocus as a new Mesa Gallium3D driver for supporting Intel Gen7 Haswell graphics and older back through the i965 class hardware. That Gallium3D driver for the aging class of Intel graphics is nearing mainline Mesa with the work-in-progress merge request now pending as of this week.

Crocus is the Intel Gallium3D driver for handling Gen4 (i965) through Gen7 (Haswell) graphics. Intel's modern "Iris" Gallium3D driver that has become their de facto OpenGL driver is what supports Gen8 Broadwell graphics and newer up through the modern Xe Graphics. If you care about vintage Intel graphics prior to Gen4, there is still the i915g Gallium3D driver in Mesa albeit rarely touched by any developers these days aside from fixes.

More than one decade after the Intel 965 chipset was launched, the open-source driver support continues to make improvements.

As outlined previously, Intel isn't behind this effort but rather Red Hat's David Airlie and Ilia Mirkin known for his Nouveau contributions although there has also been some code review/comments by others.

Since the Crocus status report in April, the driver has continued further maturing and this week Airlie opened up the initial merge request for the driver in its current state.

This is a "pretty fully functional Gallium driver" that would be mainlined but at this point wouldn't be shifting the default away from the i965 classic driver. That though could change soon with Mesa developers eyeing the removal of the Mesa classic drivers.

In any case see this MR for those still rocking out i965 to Haswell class graphics.