Questions on Intel i915 chipset (performance, gallium)

[Keith Whitwell]

> 3) I heard that the gallium-0.1 branch was supposed to somehow work for 
> i915 chipsets. I didn't expect any miracles and tried it out. What can I 
> say? It doesn't even build (correctly) for me. I wasn't expecting this, 
> but I think it's primarily my fault.
> AFAIK there are currently two build systems in the tree, SCons and 
> regular Makefile building. I tried out building via Makefile but this 
> only builds the GL components and no i915_XXX.so libs. The funny thing 
> is that building via SConstruct does build a i915tex_dri.so library (but 
> no GL components).
> 
> However I couldn't make gallium work by combining the two builds. Either 
> libdrm is too old and when updating libdrm to GIT it's too new (marcheu 
> told me about DRI2 problems with gallium on IRC, so I suspect this to be 
> the problem).
> So I wanted to ask what package versions I need to get this running and 
> what target I'm supposed to build when using the Makefile.

It's currently pretty difficult to get the i915 driver on gallium-0.1 branch to build - due to all the changes to the other parts of the stack (X.org, DDX, DRM, etc).  

Jakob has put some time into producing an updated version of this driver, which is currently on the gallium-i915-current branch.

However -- I wouldn't get too excited about the possibility of using this driver as a day-to-day tool.  At this point it probably doesn't offer the performance of the other options you've tried -- though that should change over the next few weeks/months.

Keith