It's Looking Like The Intel Gallium3D "ILO" Driver Will Be Laid To Rest

Back in December was talk of dropping the (unofficial) Intel "ILO" Gallium3D driver while now it's looking like that may move forward.

The Intel ILO Gallium3D driver was developed by LunarG as a sort of proving-grounds for low-level driver experiments, comparing ILO to the classic i965 Mesa driver, and more. But that ILO driver hasn't been really touched in years, doesn't properly support recent generations of Intel hardware, and has basically fallen into disrepair.

In December was the proposal to remove it from the Mesa Git tree. Some possible future use-cases were talked about like using ILO in order to run the Direct3D 9 (Gallium Nine) state tracker on Intel hardware, but it looks like it's going to be put out to sea with no one stepping up to take over it.

Chia-I Wu who led the development of ILO at LunarG commented, "I think it is fine to drop the driver :( Not because the driver is currently unmaintained, which is very true and is a very good reason, but that there is now a Intel Vulkan driver. Vulkan is somewhat as low-level as Gallium is (or even lower-level). The driver has most things I like to see as well (low CPU overhead, minimal/predictable heap allocation, generated register descriptions, etc.). Sorry for the confusions and burdens it bring to others, and thanks to the few individuals/groups who find it useful for their needs at various times."

Edward O'Callaghan has now re-based his patch for dropping the ILO Gallium3D driver, per this Mesa-dev message. The work hasn't yet hit Mesa Git, but given the lack of opposition, it will probably land soon. Removing this unmaintained Intel Gallium3D driver lightens Mesa by around 54k lines of code.