Intel's Gallium3D Driver Will Now Try To Recover From GPU Hangs

The Intel Gallium3D OpenGL driver performance is now in good shape for this new open-source Intel Linux GL driver compared to its "classic" Mesa driver, but there are still various other features to be ironed out before this "Iris" driver can become the new default. One of the items now crossed off the list is GPU hang recovery.

As of this past week, new code for Mesa 19.2 introduces support for this Intel Gallium3D driver to recover from GPU hangs. The driver will now attempt to detect when a GEM memory context has been banned and to create a new context and reinitialize the state, hopefully getting past whatever caused the original GPU hang.

In my testing of the Intel Gallium3D driver a lot particularly over the past two months, this driver has been in good shape and I don't recall hitting any hangs, especially nothing release. But obviously for OpenGL drivers it makes sense having hang recovery in place and puts this driver one step closer to feature parity with the current Mesa driver.

Intel is hoping for this new open-source OpenGL driver to be "viable" for Mesa 19.2 and the default by year's end. Mesa 19.2 will be out in late August while Mesa 19.3 will end out the 2019 series in late November. This Gallium3D driver supports Broadwell/Gen8 graphics and newer while older hardware will remain supported by their existing driver.