Repository: alacritty/alacritty

Issue #128: Support GPUs without OpenGL 3.3+ drivers
Created: 2017-01-07T00:27:37Z
I've been looking for an extremely fast terminal emulator for many years. xterm has unfixed rendering bugs and is slower than molasses. I don't like urxvt's lack of memory management. st uses more memory than xterm (yep!).
Just saw Alacritty on HN and was determined to try it out.
What are your plans for older hardware? I'm currently using a couple of laptops from 2007-2008: a ThinkPad T43 and a ThinkPad T60. Unfortunately the Rust nightly you're currently using is broken on i686 (#126) so I can't test Alacritty on the T43, but it reported the error in the title on my T60 (which has a slightly better GPU, FWIW).
T43 specs:
OpenGL vendor string: X.Org R300 Project
OpenGL renderer string: Gallium 0.4 on ATI RV370
OpenGL version string: 2.1 Mesa 11.0.2
OpenGL shading language version string: 1.20

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: AMD/ATI [Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.] RV370/M22 [Mobility Radeon X300]

T60 specs:
Extended renderer info (GLX_MESA_query_renderer):
    Vendor: X.Org R300 Project (0x1002)
    Device: ATI RV515 (0x7145)
    Version: 11.2.2
    Accelerated: yes
    Video memory: 128MB

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] RV515/M54 [Mobility Radeon X1400]

Yep, I realize these are kind of the "oh wow" of GPU land :) but I'm genuinely wondering what the best approach would be to support GPUs like these - I've been pondering making my own terminal emulator for a little while (as well as a 2D engine too, actually), but have absolutely no knowledge of OpenGL, Vulkan, etc.
"It would be impossible" is completely understandable; "it would require a nontrivial architecture redesign" also wouldn't be too surprising.

Duplicate issue #530: GLSL / Intel Integrated Graphics / Shader compile fail
Created: 2017-04-30T22:06:38Z
I installed Alacritty onto my Arch machine through the pacman/yaourt manager and receive an error when I try to run Alacritty:

There was an error initializing the shaders: failed compiling shader: 0:14(10): error: GLSL 3.30 is not supported. Supported versions are: 1.10, 1.20, and 1.00 ES

I couldn't find a relevant ticket on this Alacritty Git; but I found a corresponding error on a different Git: c42f/displaz#89
I'm not an expert of any sort but I expect (from the displaz git ticket) that the error I'm receiving is from the integrated Intel graphics chip itself not supporting GLSL versions higher than 1.20.
Here is lspci for my VGA:

[johnd@aa8440]: ~>$ sudo lspci -vnn | grep VGA -A 12
[sudo] password for johnd:
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation Core Processor Integrated Graphics Controller [8086:0046] (rev 02) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
Subsystem: Hewlett-Packard Company Device [103c:172a]
Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 32
Memory at d0000000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4M]
Memory at c0000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=256M]
I/O ports at 5058 [size=8]
[virtual] Expansion ROM at 000c0000 [disabled] [size=128K]
Capabilities: [90] MSI: Enable+ Count=1/1 Maskable- 64bit-
Capabilities: [d0] Power Management version 2
Capabilities: [a4] PCI Advanced Features
Kernel driver in use: i915
Kernel modules: i915

Edit: Some more info...

[johnd@aa8440]: ~>$ lshw -numeric -C display
WARNING: you should run this program as super-user.
*-display
description: VGA compatible controller
product: Core Processor Integrated Graphics Controller [8086:46]
vendor: Intel Corporation [8086]
physical id: 2
bus info: pci@0000:00:02.0
version: 02
width: 64 bits
clock: 33MHz
capabilities: vga_controller bus_master cap_list rom
configuration: driver=i915 latency=0
resources: irq:32 memory:d0000000-d03fffff memory:c0000000-cfffffff ioport:5058(size=8) memory:c0000-dffff

Inxi and glxinfo...

[johnd@aa8440]: ~>$ inxi -M
Machine:   Device: laptop System: Hewlett-Packard product: HP EliteBook 8440p
Mobo: Hewlett-Packard model: 172A v: KBC Version 30.35
BIOS: Hewlett-Packard v: 68CCU Ver. F.60 date: 11/11/2015
Battery    BAT0: charge: 24.1 Wh 69.0% condition: 34.9/34.9 Wh (100%)
[johnd@aa8440]: ~>$ glxinfo | grep OpenGL
OpenGL vendor string: Intel Open Source Technology Center
OpenGL renderer string: Mesa DRI Intel(R) Ironlake Mobile
OpenGL version string: 2.1 Mesa 17.0.5
OpenGL shading language version string: 1.20
OpenGL extensions:
OpenGL ES profile version string: OpenGL ES 2.0 Mesa 17.0.5
OpenGL ES profile shading language version string: OpenGL ES GLSL ES 1.0.16
OpenGL ES profile extensions:

Let me know if there is anymore info I can provide! Thanks! :)

Closing comment (2017-05-04T14:43:57Z): Thanks for the reports @nantronic2 and @lilianmoraru.
This looks like a dupe of #128. Please subscribe to that issue for further updates.