Mesa News Archives

With the latest Etnaviv DRM code there is now performance counters support for being able to read the hardware counters via perfmon domains. The patches have now been published for making use of these Vivante performance counters from user-space.

As a more modern and feature alternative to the DriConf configuration program for tweaking Mesa driver settings, a few months back we featured ADRICONF as the Advanced DRI Configuration. Recently this GUI program has picked up a few more features.

The RADV Vulkan driver performance on the latest Mesa Git code is already looking quite good compared to the NVIDIA Vulkan Linux performance and even the Vulkan driver on Radeon Software under Windows. But the game is not over for the never-ending process of tuning the driver for optimal performance.

After a one month development hiatus, Mesa 18.0 is due to be released today as the first major Mesa 3D release of 2018.

An independent contributor to Mesa has posted a set of patches for implementing NVIDIA's OpenGL conservative rasterization extensions.

While Mesa 18.0 should finally be out on Friday as the major quarterly update to the Mesa 3D drivers, Mesa 17.3.7 is out today and it's a rather big update for being just another point release to last month's 17.3 series.

Nearly one and a half months since Mesa 18.0-RC4 and nearly one month since last seeing any Git activity on the "18.0" Mesa Git branch, it's finally been updated today with the availability of Mesa 18.0-RC5.

Last week the release candidate of Mesa 17.3.7 was issued with more than 50 patches queued. That count grew more over the weekend resulting in an additional release candidate.

Earlier this year work on the "Chai" open-source Mali T700 GPU driver resumed with an aim to get a working Mesa driver for this "Midgard" graphics architecture. There's still a long battle ahead, but their NIR shader compiler is beginning to work.

While waiting for Mesa 18.0, the Mesa 17.3.7 point release will soon hit stable users of this open-source, user-space graphics stack.

Mesa 18.0's delay of more than one month and without any new release candidate came while the open-source Intel developers were hunkered down to clear the remaining blocker bugs.

Timothy Arceri of Valve's open-source Linux GPU driver team is out with his latest set of patches to further enhance the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver.

Mesa 18.0 had been due for release around mid-February, but that didn't happen and there hasn't even been a release candidate in more than one month.

Yesterday we wrote about David Airlie working on a fresh push to get "soft FP64" support in Mesa for allowing some older graphics cards on the R600g driver to then have OpenGL 4 support thanks to this double-precision floating-point support being their last blocker. That code is moving forward.

Following the very bumpy Mesa 17.3 releases, Mesa developers are currently discussing ideas for improving the release process moving forward.

There's been work going on for years of "soft" FP64 support to allow emulated support for the double-precision floating-point data types for GPUs not otherwise inherently supporting this capability. The soft support would allow for some older GPUs to then advertise OpenGL 4.0+ support now that ARB_gpu_shader_fp64 support could be enabled. That day looks like it's finally coming for mainline Mesa.

Of the many features coming to X.Org Server 1.20 there is now Direct Rendering Infrastructure 3 (DRI3) versions 1.1 and 1.2. Mesa has now received its patches for making use of the new functionality.

With today's Mesa 18.1-devel Git code, the last of the Tegra/Nouveau code has landed where it's now rounded off for offering a completely open-source and accelerated graphics stack that works well on the Tegra210 (Tegra X1) SoC.

Waking up this morning and preparing for Vulkan 1.1 I wasn't too sure what to expect from the open-source drivers and certainly wouldn't have envisioned in my wildest dreams that by the time of going to sleep there would be initial support merged into Mesa Git on launch-day for a major graphics API update... But open-source developers have achieved just that today.

It was last summer that a GSoC student developer worked on an OpenMAX Tizonia state tracker for Gallium3D to replace the existing and out-of-date "Bellagio" code. Finally today that new Tizonia code has landed in Mesa 18.1-devel Git.

Version 2.4.91 of the Mesa DRM library (libdrm) is now available for this component that notably sits between the Linux kernel and various user-space clients like Mesa and the X.Org Server.

Intel's i965 Mesa OpenGL driver now allows for 48-bit addressing, which greatly expands the GPU memory limits.

Going back to last November has been MSAA fast-clear patches for the Intel "ANV" Vulkan driver while today they were finally merged.

In the past we have reported on work done by students at the Imperial College London on fuzzing OpenGL drivers and in the process uncovering various driver bugs affecting Linux too. They have out a new WebGL demo that has already uncovered at least one Mesa driver bug.

Valve Linux GPU driver developer Timothy Arceri provided a status update today on the RadeonSI NIR back-end that is needed as part of the SPIR-V ingestion upbringing and that this Radeon GCN OpenGL driver may switch to using NIR by default in the future.

It's been just one week since the Mesa 17.3.5 debut while today it's been succeeded by v17.3.6 as what's being advertised as an emergency release.

There has been some interesting open-source GPU compute happenings in the works this year including SPIR-V support for Gallium3D Clover and Nouveau NIR support along with associated Mesa changes. Rob Clark of Red Hat and lead developer on the Freedreno driver has also jumped on board these recent Mesa compute initiatives.

Going back to last October, Marek of AMD's open-source driver team has been working on ARB_compatibility support for Mesa with a focus on RadeonSI/Gallium3D. Today that work was finally merged.

We've known that Pengutronix developers had been working on i.MX8M / GC7000 graphics support within their Etnaviv open-source driver stack from initial patches posted in January. Those patches back at the start of the year were for the DRM kernel driver, but it turns out they have already got basic 3D acceleration working.

The glxinfo utility is handy for Linux users in checking on their OpenGL driver in use by their system and related information. But it's not often that glxinfo itself gets updated, except that changed today with the release of mesa-demos-8.4.0 as the package providing this information utility.

It's been a busy past week for open-source GPU compute with Intel opening up their new NEO OpenCL stack, Karol Herbst at Red Hat posting the latest on Nouveau NIR support for SPIR-V compute, and now longtime Nouveau contributor Pierre Moreau has presented his latest for SPIR-V Clover support.

If you are making use of the Mesa 17.3 releases, have you found them to be buggier than normal for this open-source 3D graphics driver stack? There remains a higher than average amount of bugs still outstanding that have plagued Mesa 17.3, even with being up to 17.3.5.

Last year we covered the work on the project "Chai" as an open-source, reverse-engineered driver for Mali T700 series. After a hiatus, the lead developer is back working on the project.

While Mesa 17.3.4 was just released a few days ago with 90+ changes, Mesa 17.3.5 is now available as a quick follow-up release due to a serious bug.

Marek Olšák on Saturday released the big libdrm 2.4.90 DRM library update that sits between Mesa and other GPU user-space components and the kernel's Direct Rendering Manager code.

At the start of the new year Marek Olšák of AMD posted a set of patches for 32-bit GPU pointers in RadeonSI. That work has now landed in mainline Mesa Git.

While Mesa 18.0 should be released in the days ahead as the latest feature release to Mesa 3D, backporting of fixes/improvements to Mesa 17.3 isn't letting up. For those using this stable series from last quarter, Mesa 17.3.4 is out today with nearly 100 changes.

Last October well known open-source AMD driver developer Marek Olšák began work on OpenGL compatibility profile support for Mesa. This work is about OpenGL 3.1 with ARB_compatibility support, something generally relevant for workstation OpenGL users and one of the few remaining advantages of AMD's current proprietary OpenGL driver.

Freedreno project leader Rob Clark who is employed by Red Hat has provided a status update on his activities around this reverse-engineered, open-source Qualcomm Adreno graphics driver.

With the Gallium3D OpenGL on-disk shader cache most notably used right now by the RadeonSI driver, TGSI is the intermediate representation currently being cached to the disk for speeding up game load times, etc. Given the RadeonSI NIR back-end continuing to mature, Timothy Arceri of Valve has added NIR caching support.

Mesa 18.0, the first new Mesa 3D release of 2018, is coming up quite soon while today brings the fourth release candidate.

In addition to Igalia developers being at FOSDEM 2018 to talk about their work on Chromium porting for Wayland, Alejandro Piñeiro of this Spain consulting firm talked about their contributions towards SPIR-V support within Mesa and particularly for the Intel i965 OpenGL driver.

David Airlie has announced his plans to begin mainlining some early infrastructure work on the "soft" FP64 code into Mesa Git. This doesn't yet allow for soft FP64 on older GPUs lacking the hardware capability to do this otherwise, but will help in another area and can make for easier mainlining of the actual soft FP64 support in the future.

With the RadeonSI NIR back-end continuing to mature with more OpenGL coverage and now supporting GLSL 4.50, I decided to run some tests of Mesa 18.1-dev Git to see the impact when enabling NIR support.

Emil Velikov announced the release today of Mesa 18.0-RC3 with 50+ changes comprising of many Intel ANV and Radeon RADV Vulkan driver fixes.

As a follow-up to the article a few days ago about nearly complete OpenGL 4.4~4.5 support for R600g, this pre-GCN older Radeon Gallium3D driver has landed in Mesa 18.1-dev Git support for its final OpenGL 4.4 extension.

It didn't happen in time for the upcoming Mesa 18.0, but the R600 Gallium3D driver for supporting pre-GCN AMD Radeon graphics processors is now nearly at OpenGL 4.5 compliance! A needed OpenGL 4.4 extension is now scratched off the list completing the necessary extensions to effectively have GL 4.5, assuming it can pass the conformance test suite.

Feature development on Mesa 18.0 has now ended with the release today of 18.0-RC1 following the code-base being branched.

Last May we reported on a Nouveau developer adding SPIR-V support to Gallium3D's OpenCL state tracker. Finally the better part of one year later, Pierre Moreau is ready with the second version of these patches to accept this IR associated with Vulkan / OpenCL 2.1+ within Clover.

It was just a few days ago that Valve Linux developer Timothy Arceri enabled GLSL 4.50 support for RadeonSI's NIR back-end after previously taking care of tessellation shaders and other requirements. Now he has taken to implementing some other extensions in RadeonSI's NIR code-path.