Amber Branch

After Mesa 21.3, all non-Gallium DRI drivers were removed from the Mesa source-tree. These drivers are still being maintained to some degree, but only on the amber branch, and only for critical fixes.

These drivers include:

  • Radeon

  • r200

  • i915

  • i965

  • Nouveau (the DRI driver for NV04-NV20)

At the same time, the OpenSWR Gallium driver was removed from the Mesa source-tree, because it was already practically speaking unmaintained and the actively maintained LLVMpipe offers much of the same functionality.

Users with Intel GPUs that were using i965 should migrate to either Iris or Crocus, depending on their GPU. These drivers generally speaking both perform better and have more features than i965 had, and due to sharing more code with the rest of the Mesa infrastructure, gets more bug fixes and features.

Similarly, users of i915 should migrate to i915g (the Gallium driver for the same hardware), as it’s still being maintained.

Users who depend on the removed drivers will have to use them built from the Amber branch in order to get updates.

Building

The Amber branch has some extra logic to be able to coexist with recent Mesa releases without them stepping on each others toes. In order to enable that logic, you need to pass the -Damber=true flag to Meson.

Documentation

On docs.mesa3d.org, we currently only publish the documentation from our main branch. But you can view the documentation for the Amber branch here.