Intel Goes Ahead & Drops i915 Driver From OpenGL 2.1 To 1.4 By Default

Intel Linux developers have partially reverted Mesa work done years ago to drop the default OpenGL behavior with the older i915 driver from exposing OpenGL 2.0+ support to now only having OpenGL 1.4 out-of-the-box.

See Older Intel Graphics To Drop From OpenGL 2.1 To 1.4 On Linux for more of the background to this story. This change just affects i915 to pre-i965 hardware by dropping OpenGL 2.0 by default due to Chrome and other applications making use of really slow code-paths when using the GL2 extensions on this old hardware that doesn't have adequate OpenGL 2 capabilities. So there's a better out-of-the-box experience by actually dropping the exposed OpenGL version back to v1.4.

But the latest Mesa code will at least continue to expose OpenGL ES 2.0 and the OpenGL 2 support can be restored if setting the fragment_shader and stub_occlusion_query options.

The change is present for Mesa 17.1.