The Current State Of The Intel "Crocus" Gallium3D Driver

The Intel "Crocus" Gallium3D driver in development for supporting old Intel i965 IGPs through Haswell continues making progress by the upstream, open-source Mesa3D community for hopefully one day replacing Intel's classic "i965" Mesa driver.

Particularly with Mesa likely to drop the classic drivers from mainline, Crocus has added importance for those with Haswell and older Intel graphics wanting to continue to use the latest mainline Mesa driver code. Being a Gallium3D driver, Crocus has the possibility of offering better performance as well for slightly squeezing a bit more out of that old Intel hardware should you still be relying upon it.

David Airlie who has been involved with the Crocus development shared a status update on the effort. With regards to the current status and Mesa upstreaming plans for Crocus it currently amounts to:

Ironlake is the best supported, it runs openarena and supertuxkart, and piglit has only around 100 tests delta vs i965 (mostly edgeflag related) and there is only one missing feature (vertex shader push constants).

Ivybridge just stop hanging on second batch submission now, and glxgears runs on it. Openarena starts to the menu but is misrendering and a piglit run completes with some gpu hangs and a quite large delta. I expect IVB to move faster now that I've solved the worst hang.

Haswell runs glxgears as well.

I think once I take a closer look at Ivybridge/Haswell and can get Ilia (or anyone else) to do some rudimentary testing on Sandybridge, I will start taking a closer look at upstreaming it into Mesa proper.

Airlie shared these latest Crocus details on his blog.