This is actually big news.
It means that all of the major GPUs with an OSS driver share a lot of code, specifically the gallium part of the mesa project.<p>This means that features like OpenCL can be implemented for one driver and with minimal effort be ported to another GPU.
Kudos for intel for doing this. They not just open source their driver, they also work with upstream to get it pushed there. This is what every vendor should do. Looking at you, Nvidia.
Hmm, I wonder if this has something to do with Intel's upcoming dGPUs? Not necessarily a bad thing, but having a scenario with lots of code reuse among drivers and a common framework means easier/faster/better support for their new stuff. Seems like a win for both Intel and the users.
>* Supports only Broadwell and newer (Gen8+); drops support for
the older Gen4-7.5 GPUs, as well as Braswell/Cherrytrail<p>Meltdown/Spectre turned out not to be a reason big enough to upgrade from Sandy/Ivy Bridge, so they had to find another way to "discontinue" current users.<p>I guess classic i915 driver for mesa will be discontinued soon, left to bit rot and then removed from Mesa as "potentially unsafe to use, because ... memory errors cause RCE".