Mesa for older devices after 22.04

I found out just now that Mesa 22.0 doesn’t support “classic” drivers.

After 22.04, are there plans on supporting “classic” devices, like my ThinkPad T510, with the Amber branch?

Is Ubuntu 22.04 going to ship Mesa 22 at all? I think that they might stick to 21.3 (as it is probably a bit more conservative as a LTS).

And out of interest: Which hardware are you concerned about? The affected AMD and NVIDIA cards were not sold after 2004.
And the GEN3 Intel Atoms affected were not sold after 2010. But those were low-powered devices from the beginning and not supposed to cope with any new OS that you throw on it. If the LTS sticked to Mesa 21.3 those cards would be supported until 2026, a minimum of whopping 16 years for this low powered hardware. And nobody can stop you from using it even further (like some people still use Windows XP).
For GEN3 Intels I would stick to the upcoming LTS then and not upgrade to 22.10 in autumn.

I find this disappointing because a few times a year I do fix bugs in mutter/gnome-shell that are specific to the “classic” Intel drivers and everything still works well in Mesa 21 AFAIK. But also I knew it was coming and am not involved in Mesa development. I have no power to stop Mesa from retiring older Intel GPU support.

Even if we stick with Mesa 21 in Ubuntu 22.04, the same issue is going to come up again in Ubuntu 22.04.1, 22.04.2 … So hopefully owners of the older Intel GPUs will still be fine with 22.04(.0) and Mesa 21. They would then have the option of avoiding the HWE updates that might drop support for those GPUs. If on the other hand Ubuntu 22.04 did ship Mesa 22 next month then the only option left will be for those users to stick with Ubuntu 20.04.

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Yeah, I remember that you debugged an atomic mode page flipping glitch for me, when I was still on my Braswell powered Beebox (j3160). Thank you for that (I am now using a Beebox with a Ryzen 7, though :wink: )
But it think that even my old Braswell would still be supported AFAIK.

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I meant AFTER 22.04 (so 22.10 and beyond)

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@YamiYukiSenpai, did you try MESA_LOADER_DRIVER_OVERRIDE=crocus with Mesa 22 on the ThinkPad T510? Maybe put it in /etc/environment.

Nah. I would’ve if I saw this.

I was troubleshooting my ThinkPad when I found out about it. I installed Mesa 22 because about a month ago, desktop kept on freezing, & Mesa 22 was the workaround. I didn’t report the bug about Mesa 22 to the maintainer till much later (got busy).

And he was the one who informed me about Mesa 22 not having support for legacy graphics hardware.

Would it be possible to have a separate “classic” Mesa package for older hardware?

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They are planning to make 21.3 parallel installable with 22.0+, it’s the “Amber” project…
https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/mesa-dev/2022-February/225689.html

Then there’s also “crocus” and “i915g” yes…

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It just happened; Mesa 22 is now in Ubuntu 22.04.

If you need older drivers like for Intel Arrandale GPUs then my immediate recommendation would be to stick with Ubuntu 20.04 instead.

Alternative solutions that may work with Ubuntu 22.04 are:

  • Multiple versions of Mesa installed.
  • The “crocus” driver: Try MESA_LOADER_DRIVER_OVERRIDE=crocus in /etc/environment and let us know how you go. Or is it loaded by default now?..
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That came unexpected that late in the cycle. Feature freeze long gone and Beta Freeze on Monday.

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mesa-amber is packaged, it’s based on 21.3.x, ‘libgl1-mesa-dri’ has ‘Recommends: libgl1-amber-dri’ but that’s not getting installed on upgrade, probably will need to make it Depends instead

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I plan on testing some relevant systems this week to assess how things have changed in Mesa 22: Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge, Haswell, and maybe Arrandale if I can find one.

If crocus works well enough for pre-Broadwell in Mesa 22 then we should focus on that.

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Alright I’ve finished testing jammy on Arrandale, Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge and Haswell. Since Mesa 22.0 they all use the crocus driver automatically and it works just fine.

No bugs to see here. Although if you do find any then please report them using:

ubuntu-bug gnome-shell

or if the above command fails then directly in Launchpad.

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I just tested with my ThinkPad T510, and Mesa 22’s working fine :slight_smile:

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Many thanks for testing !

We need Ubuntu to support the more old device we could ( apart from 32 bits … )

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T510 still runs like a champ

I know I shouldn’t be reporting bugs here, but this issue seems to keep popping up when I try to install Kubuntu 22.04 on my T510.

I’m using the stable release image, not the old daily image or something like that. I was reinstalling it today. It worked when I switched to Kubuntu 21.10.

Please create a new bug from the affected Kubuntu 22.04 system so we can investigate it formally:

ubuntu-bug mesa

Please also ensure you are not using any PPAs before reporting bugs.

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The problem is that it only affects installation. Do I still run ubuntu-bug?

When I upgraded to 22.04 from 21.10, problem didn’t appear. And I’m using Liquorix kernel on it now.