Mesa 20.0 Now Includes Intel's Gallium3D Driver To Build By Default

As part of the ongoing effort for Intel's plans to use their new Gallium3D OpenGL Linux driver by default on next quarter's Mesa 20.0 for Broadwell "Gen8" graphics and newer, another step in that direction was achieved on Friday.

Intel's "Iris" Gallium3D driver is still making good progress in its goal for Mesa 20.0 to switch the default "i965" classic driver to Intel Gallium3D for Broadwell and newer hardware. Earlier this week was adding a build-time option to change the Intel OpenGL driver default so those building from source or distribution vendors can change the default on their own with ease.

The new achievement is building Iris by default. When Mesa Gallium3D is enabled (pretty much all builds these days...), the Iris Gallium3D driver is included automatically rather than having to select it. Iris now follows R300, R600, RadeonSI, Nouveau, VirGL, VMware SVGA, and SWRAST in being the default x86/x86_64 Gallium3D drivers. Others like V3D and Freedreno meanwhile default to on for ARM/AArch64 builds.

The next step will ideally be to flip on the Gallium3D driver as the default run-time selection for supported hardware to allow for more testing ahead of Mesa 20.0 feature freeze that is expected around the end of January before seeing the stable release at the end of February or March. Originally Intel hoped to change the default for Mesa 19.3 but then delayed it a quarter to Mesa 20.0 to allow more time for ensuring no functional or performance regressions.