>* Supports only Broadwell and newer (Gen8+); drops support for
the older Gen4-7.5 GPUs, as well as Braswell/Cherrytrail
Meltdown/Spectre turned out not to be a reason big enough to upgrade from Sandy/Ivy Bridge, so they had to find another way to "discontinue" current users.
I guess classic i915 driver for mesa will be discontinued soon, left to bit rot and then removed from Mesa as "potentially unsafe to use, because ... memory errors cause RCE".
> Meltdown/Spectre turned out not to be a reason big enough to upgrade from Sandy/Ivy Bridge, so they had to find another way to "discontinue" current users.
I sit beside the author of the Iris driver and work on the same team at Intel. The reasoning for only supporting BDW+ has absolutely nothing to do with spectre/meltdown or trying to force people to upgrade their hardware. Such a statement really indicates that you're not familiar with the people on Intel's Mesa team.
FYI the reasoning for only supporting BDW+ is that BDW+ supports 48-bit addressing which allows the CPU and GPU to share addresses trivially. This means no relocations are required and that's a great driver simplification and performance improvement.
BDW+ also supports executing all shader stages in the "scalar" (vs the vec4) mode, which allows much better opportunity for shader compiler optimization, which is the area I spend most of my time.
Open source drivers don't work the way proprietary drivers do. For example, the Rage 128 from 1998 is still receiving updates in Mesa.[1] Before spreading unfounded conspiracy theories, you should do some research.
I still see the 3dfx driver in my mesa folder... I'm surprised now since I thought I read it was removed a year ago or so, but that might have been the kernel driver.
While the parent's post could be stated better, I share part of this fear: What about the older GPUs?
Knowing the open source attitude, they'll probably enter maintenance mode and get bugfixes but only incidental improvements. And then be supported until the last piece of hardware goes to bit heaven. Which is fine by me.
But Intel is paying for development, and of course Intel wants us to buy the latest. Who can blame them? There will be some pushing from them to stop spending money on their old stuff.
Therefore, some statement in the blog post concerning this point would be appreciated.
> For AMD GPUs, Brazos owners are SOL after they rebooted the driver design, only having partial support for what fxglr was capable of.
Doesn't Northern Islands have OpenGL 4.4 (and all but one extension in 4.5, and about half of 4.6) w/ r600? What exactly is missing relative to the last FGLRX release for NI?
There's UVD support all the way back to R600 (the first AMD chipset to include UVD), two generations before Northern Islands (which I think is what Brazos has), and there has been since before fglrx was discontinued AFAICT. I think on most distributions this support is packaged separately from the rest of Mesa, which may be why you didn't see it.
Meltdown/Spectre turned out not to be a reason big enough to upgrade from Sandy/Ivy Bridge, so they had to find another way to "discontinue" current users.
I guess classic i915 driver for mesa will be discontinued soon, left to bit rot and then removed from Mesa as "potentially unsafe to use, because ... memory errors cause RCE".