Solutions for acceleration on old i915 hardware?

English Hardware
1

Hi, running openSUSE Tumbleweed on an old netbook I have bears some pretty interesting results (especially for the old KDE 3 still maintained and available for installation) but I’m having the issue of 3D acceleration not being available for the Intel GMA chipset it has, due to the old i915 driver being DRI-based, something which was deprecated in mainline mesa.

Now, on any Debian/Ubuntu based distro I would simply be able to get mesa-amber from either the MX repositories or a PPA, but on openSUSE that’s simply not the case.
I have tried compiling the Amber branch and setting it up through env. variables (shamefully) through an AI-assisted workaround, but it hasn’t “fully” worked due to only applying for OpenGL 1.x-2.0, whereas GL 3.x/4.x still relied on software rendering;
so even on lighter games I’ve tried (like Extreme Tux Racer, OldUnreal UT99) I experience subpar performance due to them using the latest OpenGL they support instead of 1/2.

I need to know:
Does someone provide the packages for amber? or,

Are there instructions on packaging Mesa/Amber by myself? If that’s the case I could simply make my own OBS repository. Or,

Is Mesa compiled with support for the i915g driver, does it support the GMA 3150 I’m using, and if yes can I enable it some way?

2

Possibly a comment directed to tiwai’s failure to answer the needinfo since September for https://bugzilla.opensuse.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1249236 would be useful. I reported it based on GMA 3100, so problem I would think to be categorically identical.

3

Weird. I’ll check if it works still (it should, i tried the first time quite a few months after this bug report and it worked fine)

4

Hi, doesn’t seem like I ever got an answer. It seems like i915g hasn’t been compiled into SUSE’s Mesa, so I think I’ll try to make a feature request on the bugzilla.

5

Support for such ancient hardware got removed years ago in Mesa
https://docs.mesa3d.org/amber.html
So it is unlikely that a feature request to compile it into an actual Mesa will succeed. Better make e request to add the amber branch package which still provides some basic support for such ancient hardware.

6

I’m not talking about the old DRI1 driver, I’m talking about i915g I-Nine-Fifteen-Gee where the G stands for Gallium and has existed for about twelve years or more. I’m aware classic i915 needs amber.