Emulator

It's i915...that's what it shows in the OpenGL Info Center and with lspci -v (kernel driver in use).

That could be the case but the game was running fine with the specs so they shouldn't get bumped for all of Dolphin, just the Wii or select games etc...at the very least it should only show a prompt but still allow you to play the game. This change should get reverted.

Concerning getting a graphics card / graphics cards with FOSS (FOSS-only gaming), I tried my best to at least improve the information on this even if hardware-support isn't improved, for example here: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/wrnjdp/any_list_of_graphics_cards_benchmarked_using_foss/

Please change the Questionable status with this additional info.

As an effort to improve Dolphin's overall emulation quality while also keeping maintainability simple, we often add support for new features and drop old features over time. Currently, this issue does not sound like a Dolphin issue. I asked one of my friends much more familiar with Linux. They gave some further information.

1. If dolphin says it can't initialize the video driver, it likely is correct: it likely cannot.
2. If the reason it can't is due to dolphin having a bug in the video initialization, or because of official dolphin packaging/build process, then it is a valid bug. There isn't much evidence that this is the case.
3. If dolphin no longer supports a given graphics card, it's not going to just continue with a prompt. It's just not going to work. Failing to initialize the context is a driver issue, dolphin can't reasonably work around it.
4. i915 is an Intel driver for an extremely wide variety of chipsets, and is not specific enough to tell if it is supported. List the CPU model itself. It should be visible from /proc/cpuinfo.

Please post one or both of the following:

• The output for the 'neofetch' command (you may need to install it first)
• The output of 'glxinfo | grep OpenGL' (this IS case sensitive)

If it's not a dolphin issue why did it work in the past but doesn't anymore? At the least, the issue in Dolphin is that it doesn't provide enough (or any) information to be able to debug and solve this problem. I have no idea why it doesn't work anymore.

I would also assume that it really can't initialize the video driver if that is the step that is failing.

If it's a driver issue why did it work before when I used the same driver?

I checked cat /proc/cpuinfo but why would the CPU model be needed? lsmod also only displays i915, it's a very common CPU.

glxinfo | grep OpenGL displays this:

OpenGL vendor string: Intel
OpenGL renderer string: Mesa Intel(R) HD Graphics 530 (SKL GT2)
OpenGL core profile version string: 4.6 (Core Profile) Mesa 20.3.5
OpenGL core profile shading language version string: 4.60
OpenGL core profile context flags: (none)
OpenGL core profile profile mask: core profile
OpenGL core profile extensions:
OpenGL version string: 4.6 (Compatibility Profile) Mesa 20.3.5
OpenGL shading language version string: 4.60
OpenGL context flags: (none)
OpenGL profile mask: compatibility profile
OpenGL extensions:
OpenGL ES profile version string: OpenGL ES 3.2 Mesa 20.3.5
OpenGL ES profile shading language version string: OpenGL ES GLSL ES 3.20
OpenGL ES profile extensions:

Looks like Vulkan is supported on that GPU - try running `sudo apt install mesa-vulkan-drivers', rebuilding Dolphin, then using that instead of OpenGL as the backend.

Installed mesa-vulkan-drivers. Followed the steps of https://wiki.dolphin-emu.org/index.php?title=Building_Dolphin_on_Linux#Step_2_-_Get_the_Dolphin_Repository to rebuild Dolphin

Then I launch Dolphin with dolphin-emu or ./Build/Binaries/dolphin-emu and go to Option->Graphics settings->change Backend from OpenGL to Vulkan

When I try to launch the GameCube game that worked previously on this machine I get:

"Failed to create Vulkan surface."

and when I press OK get the same Warning message as when I try to run it with OpenGL as backend ("Failed to initialize video backend!").

The only output in the console is:

MESA-INTEL: warning: Performance support disabled, consider sysctl dev.i915.perf_stream_paranoid=0

MESA-INTEL: warning: Performance support disabled, consider sysctl dev.i915.perf_stream_paranoid=0

MESA-INTEL: warning: Performance support disabled, consider sysctl dev.i915.perf_stream_paranoid=0

Additional notes:
I built the latest version, 5.0-17738.

When I start lutris (see the linked github issue) the first output is this (in case it's useful):

Starting Lutris 0.5.11
Running Intel Mesa driver 20.3.5 on Mesa Intel(R) HD Graphics 530 (SKL GT2) (0x1912)
GPU: 8086:1912 1462:7A72 (i915 drivers)
MESA-INTEL: warning: Performance support disabled, consider sysctl dev.i915.perf_stream_paranoid=0
Startup complete

Nothing about Vulkan in that output anymore.

I don't think "perf_stream_paranoid" is the cause of this. If anybody recommend setting it to 0, please explain what it does and why that would be needed, I'd prefer having it at 1 and don't think I changed the default setting. I found this thread about it: https://forum.manjaro.org/t/cant-change-dev-i915-perf-stream-paranoid-to-0/66339/9 (somebody there suggested "The fix here, is to add the i915 driver to the initrd so that it gets loaded early, before the actual boot process starts." which may be relevant here.)

Concerning i915, also see this question of mine here: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/713288/how-to-solve-w-possible-missing-firmware-lib-firmware-i915-skl-huc-2-0-0-bin currently when shutting down it displays "firmware: failed to load i915/kb1_dmc_ver1_27".

Lastly, I think the Status "Questionable" should be changed. If you have an idea what I could try or investigate, please comment. The thing is that it used to work, I could play this GameCube game with Dolphin on the same hardware on Debian11/KDE. As you can see from the linked issue, the cause of the problem doesn't seem to be Wayland as it also used to work with Wayland with the Dolphin version I had (but not with Lutris).

I think the thing that could confirm whether this is a Dolphin bug or not would be a clear bisect. As you're the only one that can reproduce this currently, you'd have to bisect the issue given that 5.0 works and later 5.0 dev builds don't.

I don't know why but it works now both in Lutris and with Dolphin Emulator v 5.0-17738. Probably some other package update fixed this problem.

I still can't start a Wii game because it says "Failed to submit command buffer: VK_ERROR_DEVICE_LOST (-4)" with DolphinEmu but it does work with Lutris (which has a newer version of Dolphin).