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I found a post about Vulkan for Intel graphic card (the topic is here) and decided to try out. It said that it will be available for 5th and higher generation Intel cards. I have an old 3rd gen card which will probably not work, right? I mean Vulkan is a library, so the problem is on Mesa which is basically run Vulkan, and it will work only with new cards, right? Is there any way to run a Vulkan on my old Intel?

I looked more about mesa. According to Mesa, they released version 13.0.3. After command glxinfo | grep Open I found out that I have:

OpenGL renderer string: Mesa DRI Intel(R) Ivybridge Mobile 
OpenGL core profile version string: 3.3 (Core Profile) Mesa 10.3.2
OpenGL core profile shading language version string: 3.30

Time to update, even if Vulkan will not work, installing a new version of Mesa is good. For that, we need to download the new mesa, and according to Mesa :

The general approach is the standard:
./configure
make
sudo make install

But Debian - wiki says that this is not a good idea. How can it be installed correctly; is there any way to do it from apt-get? Is it possible to install it on my system? If it is possible, which dependency must I install/update to do so? On Intel's website, I found out a list/recipe. Do I need install all of that list:

2016Q4 Intel Graphics Stack Recipe Released Notes by 20 Dec, 2016

in order to update my Mesa?

System : Debian GNU/Linux 8 (jessie) 64-bit

Graphics : Intel® Ivybridge Mobile

glxinfo | grep Open : Intel Corporation 3rd Gen Core processor Graphics Controller ... Kernel driver in use: i915

/-------------------/

I'm asking in order to understand how it work, and how to do it correctly, before I will do anything.

1 Answer 1

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In Debian, the easiest way to get newer Mesa drivers is to use the backported packages; as root:

echo deb http://httpredir.debian.org/debian jessie-backports main > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/jessie-backports.list
apt-get update
apt-get -t jessie-backports install mesa-vulkan-drivers

should do the trick; as of May 2017 that will install version 13.0.6.

If you're a little more adventurous you could try building another version of the Mesa package yourself:

sudo apt-get install devscripts build-essential
dget http://httpredir.debian.org/debian/pool/main/m/mesa/mesa_17.1.0-1.dsc
cd mesa-17.1.0
dpkg-buildpackage -us -uc

The last step will complain about missing build-dependencies, install them and try again.

Finally, the Debian X Strike Force publish instructions for building Mesa from upstream, although they're focused on running a local build just to verify bug fixes, not on replacing the installed Mesa.

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  • So is it a good idea to build package myself for the latest Mesa, or use the older version?
    – ZeroVash
    Commented Jan 8, 2017 at 14:21
  • If you want to try building the package yourself, go for it, it's risk-free: if it doesn't work, you won't have broken anything, and if it does, you'll get packages that you can install and uninstall cleanly. Using the older version is easier, that's all. Commented Jan 8, 2017 at 16:57
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    well after doing the first variant and reboot, the glxinfo still told me that it 10.3.2 instead of 12.0.4
    – ZeroVash
    Commented Jan 8, 2017 at 18:03
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    Ah, if you want newer GL drivers you need to upgrade libgl1-mesa-dri and libgl1-mesa-glx (which should upgrade the other required packages): apt-get -t jessie-backports install libgl1-mesa-{dri,glx}. The recipe in the answer installs the Vulkan drivers only. Commented Jan 8, 2017 at 18:16
  • @StephenKitt @alex_mike I did try to upgrade the libgl1-mesa-* packages but running glxinfo reports my OpenGL version to be 3.0 while card supports 4.1. what am I missing? Meanwhile I'm trying to follow how-to-install-the-latest-mesa-version-on-debian-9-stretch-linux, but I'm not sure if it's going to help
    – asgs
    Commented Nov 12, 2017 at 7:49

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