Intel's New Iris Gallium3D Driver Picks Up Experimental Icelake Bits, GL Features

One of the talks we are most interested in at XDC2018 is on the Intel "Iris" Gallium3D driver we discovered last month was in development.

We stumbled across the Iris Gallium3D driver that's been in development for months as a potential replacement to their "i965" classic Mesa driver. But they haven't really detailed their intentions in full, but we should learn more next week. This is particularly exciting the prospects of an official Intel Gallium3D driver as the company is also expected to introduce their discrete GPUs beginning in 2020 and this new driver could be part of that plan.

The Intel developers involved have continued pushing new Iris code to their public Git repository, including more code in recent days.

Most recently is the initial Icelake bits but the support is "completely untested" at this stage. The Iris Gallium3D driver for now is primarily geared for current-generation Skylake/Kabylake/Coffeelake "Gen 9" graphics.

There has also been continued work on getting the OpenGL support up to par with extensions like ARB_enhanced_layouts now being supported, among a lot of other general low-level driver work. At least we will hopefully hear more about the plans and timeline at XDC2018 running from 26 to 28 September and will as always be working on my (remote) coverage.