Google Chrome May Soon Support The LLVMpipe Driver

Up to now the LLVMpipe Gallium3D-based software rasterizer has been one of the GPU drivers to be black-listed by Google's Chrome/Chromium web-browser, but that may soon change.

As most Phoronix readers should know by now, LLVMpipe has become the common software rasterizer fallback on Mesa in place of the old non-Gallium3D swrast and the non-LLVM-based Softpipe driver. LLVMpipe is much faster than these alternatives thanks in part to leveraging LLVM for JIT'ing efficient CPU code. LLVMpipe is good enough for being a fallback scenario on modern x86 systems for composited desktops when no GPU/driver is supported, testing along a hardware-neutral code-path by developers, and other similar use-cases.

With this patch still to be reviewed, Chrome would drop its black-list of LLVMpipe. The description reads "it is fast and stable enough to allow starting the GPU process", in order to provide GPU composition with Google's web-browser. This black-list change would support LLVMpipe for Mesa 10.1.4 and newer.