Mesa News Archives


2,388 Mesa open-source and Linux related news articles on Phoronix since 2006.

Blumenkrantz Picks His Next Battle: Mesa's DRI Interfaces
Blumenkrantz Picks His Next Battle: Mesa's DRI Interfaces

Valve contractor Mike Blumenkrantz has been known for many great Mesa improvements the past several years, especially around Zink for the OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation within Mesa. Over the past four years he has taken on many great performance optimizations and other significant code undertakings to improve Mesa. Blumenkrantz has picked his latest battle and appears to be around Mesa's Direct Rendering Infrastructure (DRI) interfaces.

13 March 2024 - Direct Rendering Infrastructure - 27 Comments
Radeon Memory Visualizer Hooks Up With Qualcomm Adreno Vulkan Driver
Radeon Memory Visualizer Hooks Up With Qualcomm Adreno Vulkan Driver

Thanks to the nature of open-source and AMD making their Radeon Memory Visualizer "RMV" open-source under the GPUOpen umbrella, outside of AMD graphics drivers it's found usage elsewhere. Back in January I wrote how Intel's open-source Vulkan driver was adapted for being able to interface with the Radeon Memory Visualizer. Now this week the Qualcomm Adreno "TURNIP" Vulkan driver has also been wired up for enabling RMV integration.

10 March 2024 - TU + AMD RMV - 4 Comments
Mesa's VDPAU State Tracker Adds Support For AV1 Decoding
Mesa's VDPAU State Tracker Adds Support For AV1 Decoding

While Mesa Gallium3D drivers with capable GPUs have already supported accelerated AV1 video deocding, to date it's been limited to the Video Acceleration API (VA-API). With newly-merged code for Mesa 24.1, the VDPAU state tracker can now also handle AV1 decoding with supported drivers/GPUs.

7 March 2024 - VDPAU AV1 Decode - 24 Comments
UWP'ed Mesa Running On Microsoft Xbox, Allowing For New Game Ports With OpenGL
UWP'ed Mesa Running On Microsoft Xbox, Allowing For New Game Ports With OpenGL

Recently there has been out-of-tree successes on adapting Mesa to work on Microsoft's Universal Windows Platform (UWP). UWP is also used by the Microsoft Xbox Series X/S game consoles and in turn paired with the Microsoft D3D12 driver work within Mesa for allowing OpenGL and other APIs atop D3D12, is allowing new games/software to be ported to the Xbox.

2 March 2024 - UWP Mesa - 17 Comments
Mesa 24.0.2 Brings Many Zink Fixes, More Intel Alder Lake N IDs
Mesa 24.0.2 Brings Many Zink Fixes, More Intel Alder Lake N IDs

Mesa 24.0 series release manager Eric Engestrom is out with another on-time bi-weekly point release for this set of open-source GPU user-space driver components. There are many fixes, new Intel ADL-N PCI IDs, and other backported updates for this latest stable release.

29 February 2024 - Mesa 24.0.2 - 2 Comments
Mesa OpenGL Threading Work Sees Much Reduced Memory Footprint For OpenGL Calls
Mesa OpenGL Threading Work Sees Much Reduced Memory Footprint For OpenGL Calls

Longtime AMD open-source Mesa developer Marek Olšák after more than one decade working officially for AMD and years before that as an independent open-source contributor going back to the R300g days still has not run out of new performance optimizations to pursue. The most recent accomplishment for this leading Mesa contributor are some refinements to the OpenGL threading "glthread" code for lowering the memory footprint.

26 February 2024 - GLthread Optimizations - 11 Comments
Reverse-Engineered NPU Driver Tantalizingly Close To Proprietary Driver Performance
Reverse-Engineered NPU Driver Tantalizingly Close To Proprietary Driver Performance

When it comes to neural processing unit NPU/AI accelerators for Linux there is open-source options with the likes most notably of Intel-owned Habana Labs leading the way, Intel's iVPU driver for the NPU found within Meteor Lake SoCs, AMD recently posting a Ryzen AI Linux driver, etc. When it comes to reverse-engineered efforts, the Etnaviv project has expanded its scopes from just Vivante graphics IP to also embracing the Vivante NPU IP for running workloads like TensorFlow Lite. With the latest open-source achievements, the Etnaviv NPU performance is coming incredibly close to the proprietary and official driver.

26 February 2024 - Etnaviv NPU - 3 Comments
Mesa Looks At Making The Zink Driver Build By Default
Mesa Looks At Making The Zink Driver Build By Default

With the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver implementation continuing to prove itself robust and as performant as native hardware OpenGL drivers, the Mesa developers continue exploring new opportunities for it. Given its successes, a merge request has been opened so Zink would become part of the default drivers built by Mesa out-of-the-box without needing to manually enable it for compilation.

22 February 2024 - Default Drivers Build - 21 Comments
Etnaviv NPU Driver Further Boosts Performance, Striking Closer To The Proprietary Driver
Etnaviv NPU Driver Further Boosts Performance, Striking Closer To The Proprietary Driver

Merged for Mesa 24.1 is Teflon for Etnaviv NPU driver support in enabling reverse-engineered, open-source driver support for VeriSilicon NPU IP similar to the long-standing Etnaviv Gallium3D graphics support for Vivante graphics. Tomeu Vizoso who has been leading the work on the Etnaviv NPU support has managed to achieve another performance victory and taking the open-source driver performance closer to the proprietary driver.

9 February 2024 - Etnaviv NPU - 3 Comments
Mesa 24.0 Released With Faster Radeon RADV Ray-Tracing & Initial PowerVR Vulkan Driver
Mesa 24.0 Released With Faster Radeon RADV Ray-Tracing & Initial PowerVR Vulkan Driver

Mesa 24.0 made its very punctual debut today as the Q1'2024 feature update to this set of open-source OpenGL, Vulkan, OpenCL, and video acceleration drivers most notably used by Linux systems. From upstreaming of the Imagination PowerVR Vulkan driver to lots of Intel and AMD Radeon improvements as always, Mesa 24.0 is another great update that benefits most Linux desktop users from basic video acceleration and 3D to the most devoted Intel and AMD Linux gamers.

31 January 2024 - Mesa 24.0 - 27 Comments
Teflon Merged To Mesa 24.1 As Gallium3D Frontend For TensorFlow Lite
Teflon Merged To Mesa 24.1 As Gallium3D Frontend For TensorFlow Lite

Teflon has been merged into Mesa 24.1 as a Gallium3D front-end that TensorFlow can load for delegating the execution of operations in a neural network model. Teflon was created initially for the Etnaviv Gallium3D driver for being able to run AI inferencing on Vivante NPUs.

24 January 2024 - Gallium3D Feflon - 6 Comments
Mesa Vulkan Drivers Reach An Inflection Point: Idea Raised To Be More Like Gallium3D
Mesa Vulkan Drivers Reach An Inflection Point: Idea Raised To Be More Like Gallium3D

With Mesa's Gallium3D architecture there are different state trackers like for VA-API and OpenGL that in turn run atop the different Gallium3D hardware drivers with an aim for common code re-use and making the most of capabilities for each of the drivers. With Mesa's Vulkan drivers there isn't quite that level of code sharing/re-use given Vulkan's low-level API approach, but now the idea is raised whether the Mesa Vulkan drivers may benefit from a more Gallium3D-like runtime.

19 January 2024 - Mesa Vulkan Driver Shift? - 36 Comments
Mesa 24.0 Feature Development Ends With Many OpenGL & Vulkan Driver Features
Mesa 24.0 Feature Development Ends With Many OpenGL & Vulkan Driver Features

Mesa 24.0 feature development has concluded for this quarterly feature update to this set of open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers most notably for AMD Radeon and Intel graphics on Linux but also an increasing number of smaller drivers, like for Apple Silicon, the NVK / Nouveau drivers, Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan, and more.

11 January 2024 - Mesa 24.0 - 7 Comments
RADV Vulkan Video Encoding Still Being Worked On
RADV Vulkan Video Encoding Still Being Worked On

For Mesa 23.1 earlier this year initial RADV Vulkan Video decode support was merged for supporting GPU-based video acceleration with this Khronos video API. As we approach the end of the year, RADV's Vulkan Video encode support remains a work-in-progress but hopefully won't be too much longer before being upstreamed.

18 December 2023 - Vulkan Video Encode - 13 Comments
Etnaviv NPU Open-Source Driver Now Twice As Fast For Image Classification Workloads
Etnaviv NPU Open-Source Driver Now Twice As Fast For Image Classification Workloads

Tomeu Vizoso has been leading the effort for supporting Vivante's NPU IP within the Etnaviv driver that began as a reverse-engineered driver for Vivante graphics. The Vivante NPU architecture ends up being close to the graphics cores and Vizoso has been making good progress for enabling the NPUs on this open-source stack. The latest achievement is image classification workloads now running about twice as fast as previously.

20 November 2023 - Etnaviv NPU - 7 Comments
Microsoft Enables OpenGL 4.6 Support Over Direct3D 12
Microsoft Enables OpenGL 4.6 Support Over Direct3D 12

The week began with Microsoft taking its Mesa Direct3D 12 code from OpenGL 4.3 to OpenGL 4.4 and then a short time after that reaching OpenGL 4.5. Microsoft now closed out the week by managing to get OpenGL 4.6 implemented atop Direct3D 12.

19 November 2023 - OpenGL 4.6 On D3D12 - 34 Comments
Mesa 23.3-rc4 Released With More Fixes
Mesa 23.3-rc4 Released With More Fixes

Mesa 23.3 is gearing up for release in a week or two while out now is Mesa 23.3-rc4 for the latest weekly release candidate to this collection of open-source graphics drivers.

16 November 2023 - Mesa 23.3 - 3 Comments
Intel's Mesa Shader Compiler Backend Scheduling Now ~30% Faster
Intel's Mesa Shader Compiler Backend Scheduling Now ~30% Faster

With newly-merged optimizations to Mesa 24.0-devel, the Intel shader compiler back-end is seeing its scheduling code execute around 30% faster. This big speed-up comes due to overhauling how they store pass information and reusing that for multiple pre-RA scheduling modes.

14 November 2023 - Intel Compiler Optimization - 2 Comments

2388 Mesa news articles published on Phoronix.