Eric Engestrom has released Mesa 24.0.3 as the newest bi-weekly bug-fix release to the current Mesa 24.0 stable series graphics drivers.
Mesa News Archives
2,388 Mesa open-source and Linux related news articles on Phoronix since 2006.
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.
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.
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.
The performance is likely to be atrocious, but the Mesa Lavapipe driver implementing the Vulkan API for CPU-based execution has rolled out support for Vulkan ray-tracing.
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.
Should you be running nine or more GPUs per system, the Mesa 24.1 release next quarter will raise the limit of 8 DRM devices for the Vulkan API per system to now allow a theoretical 256 GPUs per system.
It looks like the new Panthor DRM driver will be submitted for the upcoming Linux 6.9 kernel now that it made it into drm-misc-next today. In turn the Mesa 24.1-devel code has landed support for this newer Arm Mali graphics into the Panfrost Gallium3D driver.
Valve contractor Mike Blumenkrantz is back at it working on some exciting improvements to Mesa and in particular for the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation.
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.
With the Mesa 24.1-devel Git code as of this morning, the Radeon RADV Vulkan driver is now exposing the VK_KHR_video_decode_av1 for Vulkan Video accelerated decoding of AV1 video content.
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.
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.
The open-source NVIDIA "NVK" Vulkan driver within Mesa 24.1-devel has seen improvements made for systems capable of Resizable BAR "ReBAR" support.
As a follow-up to the news of Mesa looking at enabling Zink by default as part of the drivers to build out-of-the-box, that change has now been merged. Additionally, the D3D12 Mesa driver that sees regular contributions by Microsoft engineers is also now being compiled by default when running on Windows.
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.
Mesa 24.1 Git has landed the initial infrastructure for allowing drivers to choose to using Zink instead for OpenGL via this OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation. The motivating factor for this latest Mesa work is for using Zink atop the NVK Vulkan driver for newer NVIDIA GPUs.
For those that prefer to wait for the first Mesa point release in a new series before upgrading, Mesa 24.0.1 was released on Wednesday evening with the first batch of fixes for the feature-packed Mesa 24.0.
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.
Valve contractor Friedrich Vock who is part of the team working on the open-source Linux graphics drivers has merged another RADV ray-tracing optimization for this open-source AMD Vulkan driver with this improvement in next quarter's Mesa 24.1 release.
Cassia is an in-development effort for running Microsoft Windows desktop games on Android. This work-in-progress effort is essentially akin to the Steam Play approach but targeted for Android users by leveraging Wine, DXVK, VKD3D-Proton, and then FEX for emulating x86_64 binaries on AArch64.
Following yesterday's release of VK_KHR_video_decode_av1 in Vulkan 1.3.277 for AV1 video decoding, a Mesa merge request has already been opened for adding the VK_KHR_video_decode_av1 extension to the Radeon Vulkan "RADV" 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.
The NVK driver within Mesa for open-source NVIDIA GPU support for the Vulkan API that works with the Nouveau DRM kernel driver is now capable of advertising Vulkan 1.3 API support.
Eric Engestrom with Igalia continues doing a stellar job maintaining the Mesa 23.3 stable series while also leading the Mesa 24.0 release candidates for that upcoming Q1'2024 stable series.
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.
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.
Mesa 24.0 is shaping up to be a great release for this quarter's set of open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers for Linux and other platforms. Mesa 24.0-rc2 is out today to facilitate the latest weekly test release.
Longtime AMD Mesa driver developer Marek Olšák has laid out a proposal to integrate the libdrm code within Mesa rather than being maintained as its own separate project.
This week prior to the Mesa 24.0 feature freeze / code branching, a notable merge request landed that had been worked on the past few months by one of Valve's open-source Linux graphics driver developers.
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.
Eric Engestrom has released Mesa 23.3.3 as the latest stable update to this set of open-source OpenGL and Vulkan graphics drivers plus being the first update of the new year.
Landing in Mesa 24.0-devel this week alongside other exciting changes is some pending work for enhancing VKD3D-Proton and AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution 3 (FSR 3) support for the RADV Vulkan driver.
A change merged today for Mesa 24.0 is yielding much better Vulkan ray-tracing performance for the Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" across a number of games.
Igalia's Danylo Piliaiev has contributed support to the Freedreno Gallium3D driver in Mesa 24.0 for supporting the Qualcomm Adreno 644 graphics.
Eric Engestrom has issued an on-time bi-weekly point release for the Mesa 3D graphics drivers today principally composed of open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers commonly used by the Linux desktop.
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.
It's been two weeks since Mesa 23.3 was punctually released and this week has been succeeded by the Mesa 23.3.1 point release with the first batch of bug/regression fixes.
The feature work continues pouring in for Mesa 24.0 with new OpenGL and Vulkan driver features continuing to be enabled.
The PVR Vulkan driver being developed within Mesa for modern PowerVR graphics hardware has now landed support for using the upcoming PowerVR DRM kernel driver that is being upstreamed in Linux 6.8.
Eric Engestrom with Igalia just released Mesa 23.3 as the much anticipated quarterly update to this set of open-source 3D drivers principally focused on OpenGL and Vulkan API support.
Thanks to prolific RADV driver developer Samuel Pitoiset of Valve's Linux graphics team, mesh/task shader queries have landed for GFX10.3 (RDNA2) with the in-development Mesa 24.0 while support for GFX11 (RDNA3) graphics cards is on the way.
Eric Engestrom on Friday released the fifth weekly release candidate of Mesa 23.3 with this quarterly stable release hopefully debuting in the next week.
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.
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.
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.
Thanks to prolific Mesa RADV contributor Samuel Pitoiset of Valve's Linux graphics team, a fix is on the way for addressing various issues with Unreal Engine 4 and Unreal Engine 5 games running on Linux.
Hours after writing about Microsoft's Direct3D 12 back-end for Mesa seeing OpenGL 4.4 support, the in-review OpenGL 4.5 code mentioned in that article happened to land in Mesa.
Merged overnight to Mesa 24.0 is the Rust-written NAK compiler back-end for the Nouveau Gallium3D driver and NVK Vulkan driver.
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.
2388 Mesa news articles published on Phoronix.