Dave Airlie Linux Graphics blog

For the fun of it I decided to run some real apps on lavapipe. Talos Principle is still rando crashing on startup, occasionally whatever magic value ends up being right in uninit memory and it suddenly runs fine. I started Rise of the Tomb Raider, and it renders really slowly up to the menu. Then I gave DOOM 2016 with the Vulkan renderer a go, and with a few lavapipe hacks to enable some feature bits, I managed to get it to load a game image. It's taking 5-6s per frame to render. However most of the slowness in the frame is the BPTC texture loading which is a path that I've done no tuning for so it definitely running very slowly. I think RoTR is also hitting that slow path so I guess I've some incentive to look at cleaning it up.  

The lavapipe vulkan software rasterizer in Mesa is now reporting Vulkan 1.1 support. It passes all CTS tests for those new features in 1.1 but it stills fails all the same 1.0 tests so isn't that close to conformant. (lines/point rendering are the main areas of issue). There are also a bunch of the 1.2 features implemented so that might not be too far away though 16-bit shader ops and depth resolve are looking a bit tricky. If there are any specific features anyone wants to see or any crazy places/ideas for using lavapipe out there, please either file a gitlab issue or hit me up on twitter @DaveAirlie

The crocus project was recently mentioned in a phoronix article . The article covered most of the background for the project. Crocus is a gallium driver to cover the gen4-gen7 families of Intel GPUs. The basic GPU list is 965, GM45, Ironlake, Sandybridge, Ivybridge and Haswell, with some variants thrown in. This hardware currently uses the Intel classic 965 driver. This is hardware is all gallium capable and since we'd like to put the classic drivers out to pasture, and remove support for the old infrastructure, it would be nice to have these generations supported by a modern gallium driver. The project was initiated by Ilia Mirkin last year, and I've expended some time in small bursts to moving it forward. There have been some other small contributions from the community. The basis of the project is a fork of the iris driver with the old relocation based batchbuffer and state management added back in. I started my focus mostly on the older gen4/5 hardware since it was simpler ...