Updating Mesa for instaling Vulkan

Question

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.

Solution

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.

Comments

[ZeroVash]

So is it a good idea to build package myself for the latest Mesa, or use the older version?

[Stephen Kitt]

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.

[ZeroVash]

well after doing the first variant and reboot, the glxinfo still told me that it 10.3.2 instead of 12.0.4

[Stephen Kitt]

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.

[Hugh]

@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-l‌​inux, but I'm not sure if it's going to help

[ZeroVash]

@StephenKitt Well. I fix all my problem with mesa on debian by updating kernel for the newest version as possible than update all drivers and packages and then installing mesa. And only then I got a correct version of opengl and everything. I think it because debian strict policy with stable packages.