[Intel-gfx] GMA 950 Intel 945G gallium driver

[Alan W. Irwin]

On 2012-06-22 11:18-0700 Stéphane Marchesin wrote:

> 
> 
> On Sun, Jun 3, 2012 at 5:44 AM, Emam Hossain <imamdxl8805 at gmail.com> wrote:
>       Hello Everyone,
>
>       Recently I have tested one of my old desktop which got Intel 945G on a Dual Core CPU. I have installed Ubuntu 11.10 with
>       XServer 1.11, kernel 3.2 and xf86-video-intel 2.18.
>
>       What I have found that Gallium driver i915g from Mesa 7.11 and 8 is performing better than officially supported DRI i915
>       driver.
>
>       For example, when tested against the following games:
>
>       BEEP, http://www.desura.com/games/beep (gallium plays fine while dri not)
>       BIT.TRIP.RUNNER from humble bundle, http://bittripgame.com/bittrip-runner.html  (gallium smooth gameplay, dri slow)
>       and many more.
>
>       Moreover, Windows games with WINE are not playable at all or broken with DRI driver while runs good with gallium. For example
>       with games:
>
>       Need for Speed Underground
>       Flatout 1
>       Need for Speed Most Wanted
>
>       gallium does the job while DRI does not.
>
>       So, my question is why dont support gallium driver when it is performing better than DRI driver. why not make gallium driver
>       better since Intel 945G does not have hardware support for many features, DRI driver is just slow for modern games except GL
>       1.1 games while gallium driver making use of CPU to perform those missing hardware features and making games at least run.
>       Moreover, Windows driver does similar approach like gallium 3D.
> 
> 
> I feel that the reason is that the classic i915 driver is in maintenance mode and focus is on newer GPUs. The gallium i915 driver is what
> we use on some Chrome OS machines, and that's the main reason I've been working on it.
> 
> With that said, I'm pondering exposing GL 2.1 on it, since it seems legit per the spec to hack sRGB texture support with U8 + fragment
> shader instructions. That'd allow some unigine-based games to run.
>

The i915g driver sounds like an interesting alternative for driving
older Intel equipment.  For example, one of my computers (which I am
using as a thin client/X terminal) is an ASUS Eee netbook with the
945GME chipset.  The Debian stable version of the classic driver works
okay on that.  For example, I can run "env LIBGL_ALWAYS_INDIRECT=1
foobillard" on our principal machine and display the results on the
thin client without obvious issues.  However, that is a pretty old
version of X, and there have been numerous changes to the Intel
graphics stack since then without much official testing on old
equipment (or on thin clients for that matter) by the Intel software
team.  Therefore, I am not too sure whether the newer version of the
Intel graphics stack will work well on that equipment when I upgrade
to Debian testing, and the original post in this thread (quoted above)
isn't exactly reassuring on that issue.

Therefore, I would like to try out the i915g driver myself. Are there
build instructions somewhere for that driver or better yet is there a
Debian (or Ubuntu) package that includes it?

Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state
implementation for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); the Time
Ephemerides project (timeephem.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting
software package (plplot.sf.net); the libLASi project
(unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net);
and the Linux Brochure Project (lbproject.sf.net).
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Linux-powered Science
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