Intel Begins Setting Up Driver Mappings For Classic vs. Gallium3D OpenGL Linux Drivers

Intel has previously indicated they plan for their new "Iris" Gallium3D driver to become their default OpenGL driver for Linux by EOY 2019 as far as Broadwell graphics and newer are concerned. Working in that direction and acknowledging their "Gen 12" Tiger Lake graphics will only be supported under Gallium3D OpenGL, they have begun establishing the driver mappings to handle the change-over.

For Intel to make their EOY2019 goal for defaulting to this new Gallium3D OpenGL driver on relevant generations, they need to land the change for the now-open Mesa 19.3 cycle following the Mesa 19.2 feature freeze that began earlier this month. Mesa 19.3.0 will be due out in December while the feature freeze will come in early November. But for vetting the quality of their new OpenGL driver they've been developing for more than the past year, that default switch will likely happen soon so Mesa Git users can see how well it runs, any remaining bugs, etc.

On Wednesday the support landed for indicating the different driver preferences for devices that should first try i965 versus Iris and the like. Though in that work the "first try to load Iris, then try i965" isn't yet done (the new defaults for Broadwell and newer).

But as previously reported on Phoronix, for the Gen 12 Tiger Lake graphics coming a year from now (at least), only Iris will be supported and there the i965 driver will error out if trying to be loaded on such a platform.

Going along with my recent tests of Intel's new OpenGL driver, the situation is looking good for being able to default to this Gallium3D solution for next quarter's Mesa 19.3 release.