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

[Stéphane Marchesin]

On Fri, Jun 22, 2012 at 12:41 PM, Alan W. Irwin
<irwin at beluga.phys.uvic.ca>wrote:

> 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<http://www.desura.com/games/beep>(gallium plays fine while dri not)
>>      BIT.TRIP.RUNNER from humble bundle, http://bittripgame.com/**
>> bittrip-runner.html <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


You just need to download mesa (preferably 8.x) and:
./configure --with-gallium-drivers=i915
make
make install

That should do the trick :)



> or better yet is there a
> Debian (or Ubuntu) package that includes it?
>
>
I don't think there is a debian/ubuntu package, but I could be wrong.

Stéphane
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