Intel Is Preparing A Major Restructuring Of Their Graphics Driver

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Intel Is Preparing A Major Restructuring Of Their Graphics Driver

Intel is brewing a makeover of their graphics driver stack through a large restructuring and consolidating initiative that will be formally announced in the coming weeks.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=23163

[chuckula]

Sounds like a good idea, especially if it helps fix any long standing bugs.

[david_lynch]

That approach certainly works well for nvidia - looking forward to some comparative linux-windows benchmarks under the new architecture.

[cb88]

The gallium3d drivers already have OS agnostic support built in....but I doubt Intel will use that and instead just reinvent the wheel some more.

[boxie]

It will be interesting to see how they manage this - it sounds like a project fraught with danger

[yuq825]

After several year, Intel should find this code base is very hard to maintain and full of workaround.

[meekteef]

This leaves me with no choice but to buy only Intel based graphics laptops and computers.

[chuckula]

The gallium3d drivers already have OS agnostic support built in....but I doubt Intel will use that and instead just reinvent the wheel some more.

Yeah, considering the AMDGPU drivers also use Mesa, maybe you should go yell at them for "reinventing the wheel". Except that something tells me you don't actually understand how any of this works and you just have a base Pavlovian reaction whenever you see the word "Intel".

[quaz0r]

aww how thoughtful of them, they are going to grace us with more nsa black box horseshit since there isnt quite enough of it for linux yet.

[yoshi314]

I hope this will lead to improvements. Right now intel gpu is a big red flag for me in any machine i get.

Back in the day I had a few dell AIO computers with i3-2120 cpu, and the displays would just not power up, or constantly blink between split second of display and black screen. Basically, those computers were paperweights, unless one was happy using vesa driver with them. My client wasn't, and we had him to cancel the order of those machines and to get some other ones, because they assumed that they would just work.

You could disable modesetting on those machines, but back then intel already dropped support for ums in their X driver. no modesetting, intel driver won't run

It took 5 major kernel releases to get it fixed. FIVE. I got those computers at the time kernel 3.0 or 3.1 was out, and it was finally fixed in 3.5, except it seemed to be broken again in 3.6 and fixed again in 3.7. Do the math how much time it was.

Of course, extensive debug logs were provided and whatever other information was provided in a timely manner.

Recently, i got a hp 840 g3 laptop. When display port is plugged in, one of those will happen
- boot time kernel panic (occasionally)
- total system lock up after going back to the machine after screen gets locked (no ssh, nothing) (sometimes)
- total system lock up after exiting X/wayland session back to login manager (pretty much always)

I suppose it will get resolved around kernel 4.10. Intel has terrible track record with their bug fixing, and i can only hope this will lead to easier life for me.