Mesa News Archives

First up the belated Mesa 23.1.4 is now available as the latest stable point release in the Mesa 23.1 series.

As part of AMD's interest in improving graphics around Xen virtualization for in-vehicle infotainment systems and other customer uses, AMD engineers have expanded the video acceleration capabilities provided by Mesa's Virgl code.

The High Precision Event Timer (HPET) has long been a source of issues for Linux developers and it turns out systems relying on HPET rather than the CPU's TSC have in recent months suffered significant performance degradation with the Mesa OpenGL driver code.

Mesa's Rusticl OpenGL implementation written in Rust it turns out can already run the Tinygrad open-source software with its OpenCL back-end for running the LLaMA model.

Mesa 23.2 feature development is now over with the code having been branched and the first release candidate tagged for what will be this quarter's stable release series.

Red Hat's Karol Herbst who has done a remarkable job on Rusticl as a modern OpenCL implementation written in Rust for Mesa Gallium3D drivers has another achievement under his belt: OpenCL subgroups are now in place for Mesa.

We've known since last year when Imagination published their open-source PowerVR Vulkan driver that they'd be focusing on a Vulkan hardware driver only and using the likes of the Zink compatibility layer for OpenGL support. Today Imagination formally announced OpenGL 4.6 for their GPUs via Zink.

Thanks to Joshua Ashton of Valve's Linux team, the Mesa RADV driver has added support for the VK_EXT_pipeline_robustness Vulkan extension as an efficiency win and will be beneficial for Steam Play gaming.

Lavapipe as the software-based Vulkan implementation within Mesa has now landed support for Vulkan descriptor extensions and in turn this CPU-based Vulkan implementation can begin running some Direct3D 12 games with VKD3D-Proton. Keep in mind, however, the performance is severely limited.

Mesa's Rust-written OpenCL implementation Rusticl for Gallium3D drivers has now added experimental FP16 to its feature set.

Earlier this month I ran some fresh benchmarks of Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan against RadeonSI. While Zink in general is already quite speedy and in good shape for most workloads, those tests uncovered some troubled spots and Zink lead developer Mike Blumenkrantz of Valve has been diving into some of those issues with fixes. Another merge request is pending to deal with inefficiencies in the Mesa Vulkan windowing system integration (WSI) code.

Mesa has switched from SHA1 to BLAKE3 for its shader hashing to deliver better performance.

The "Terakan" Vulkan driver continues to be developed as an open-source Vulkan API implementation catering to the aging Radeon HD 6000 series graphics processors.

In going through my recent RADV-Zink vs. RadeonSI OpenGL benchmarks, Valve's Mike Blumenkrantz has already been landing optimizations/fixes and there is another one on the way as a result.

Thanks to the driver being open-source, the ATI (AMD) R300 Gallium3D driver within Mesa is still seeing new (occasional) optimizations for Radeon graphics cards launched nearly two decades ago.

The convenient Mesa Matrix tracker that has long shown Vulkan and OpenGL versions and extensions supported by the different open-source drivers has also now begun reporting OpenCL support.

Following my recent RADV+Zink vs. RadeonSI OpenGL benchmarking for various games and workloads, Valve's Zink lead developer Mike Blumenkrantz was hopping on some of the benchmarks where this generic OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation lagged behind the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver.

VMware's SVGA Gallium3D driver that provides OpenGL support within guest virtual machines running with VMware virtualization products is now finally defaulting to using the modern NIR intermediate representative rather than Gallium3D's TGSI.

The Mesa Venus driver that provides Vulkan API support for use inside of QEMU with VirtIO-GPU has added a number of extensions to help support for the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver.

Eric Engestrom has delivered another on-time release of a Mesa stable point release. Out today is Mesa 23.1.2 for delivering the latest stable bug fixes for this collection of open-source graphics driver components commonly used on Linux systems.

Overnight another 25 patches were merged to Mesa 23.2 for improving RADV's ray-tracing code after the merge request had been in the works for the past two months.

Following yesterday's news of OpenGL 3.1 and OpenGL ES 3.0 working on the open-source driver for Apple M1/M2 graphics with Asahi Linux using their "edge" channel, those patches to the Asahi AGX Gallium3D driver have now worked their way into the upstream Mesa 23.2 codebase.

David Airlie has managed to hack together task/mesh shader support inside Lavapipe, the CPU-based software Vulkan implementation inside Mesa.

The ACO "Amd COmpiler" started by Valve for the Mesa RADV Vulkan driver has shown it can do wonders for Linux gaming performance and reducing game load times compared to AMD's official AMDGPU LLVM shader compiler back-end. Recently thanks to the work of Qiang Yu there has been much work hitting upstream Mesa for beginning to enable using the ACO compiler by the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver.

The Freedreno Gallium3D driver within Mesa 23.2-devel is now able to expose OpenGL 4.6 support for Qualcomm's Adreno 600 series graphics processors.

The V3D Gallium3D driver that is most notably used by the latest Raspberry Pi single board computers has landed support in mainline Mesa for native ASTC texture compression support.

For those that prefer waiting to the first point release before shifting to a new Mesa3D quarterly feature release, Mesa 23.1.1 is out today so you can now begin upgrading to this latest set of open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers used on Linux systems and elsewhere.

Mesa 23.1 has been released as this quarter's feature release for this collection of open-source, user-space graphics components that primarily consist of OpenGL and Vulkan drivers.

Mesa 23.1 will likely be released in the next week or two while out today is Mesa 23.1-RC4 to facilitate more last minute testing by Linux gamers and other stakeholders for this set of open-source OpenGL / Vulkan / video acceleration drivers.

VK_KHR_present_wait is an extension originally started by Keith Packard working for Valve on improving the Linux graphics stack. The VK_KHR_present_wait extension allows for waiting for present operations to complete and can be used for monitoring/pacing the application by managing the number of images not yet presented. This Vulkan extension had been supported by Mesa Vulkan drivers under X.Org and now is being enabled for Wayland environments too.

Introduced one month ago in Vulkan 1.3.246 was the new VK_EXT_shader_object extension that was worked on by developers from Activision to Valve. Zink lead developer Mike Blumenkrantz at Valve has been busy the past few weeks on getting this shader object support wired up for use by this OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver.

The newest feature added by Red Hat engineer Karol Herbst to the Rusticl Mesa OpenCL open-source driver is FP64 support.

Mesa 23.0.3 was released on Friday as the newest stable release for this collection of open-source user-space GPU driver components.

Mesa's Zink driver that implements OpenGL atop the Vulkan API has for a while been in wonderful shape for open-source AMD Radeon graphics and even in decent shape for the NVIDIA proprietary driver stack while it's also been getting into more robust shape for use on Intel's dedicated graphics cards.

While the upcoming Mesa 23.1 stable release enables RadeonSI build support for Rusticl and is working out overall, the RadeonSI driver with this Rust-written OpenCL driver is nearing the point of officially passing OpenCL conformance.

Eric Engestrom has released Mesa 23.1-rc2 right on time as the newest weekly test candidate for Mesa 23.1 as this quarter's feature update to this set of open-source OpenGL and Vulkan graphics drivers.

A change merged today for the Mesa 23.2 graphics driver stack benefits video transcoding performance for new Radeon RX 7000 series "RDNA3" graphics cards.

Following this week's Mesa 23.1 feature freeze and code branching, Eric Engestrom on Friday night published Mesa 23.1-rc1.

Landing today in Mesa 23.2-devel is support for big.LITTLE CPU detection or more broadly hybrid CPU core detection where little cores (e.g. E cores) are defined as having less than 50% the capacity of the largest CPU core on the system. This is done since Mesa's OpenGL threading is now being disabled for small hybrid processors.

Mesa 23.1 enables RadeonSI Rusticl support while for next quarter's Mesa 23.2, which just started development, there is already a big ticket item for Rusticl: Shared Virtual Memory (SVM) support.

The Mesa 23.1 graphics driver code is now branched that marks an end to this quarter's feature development. Mesa 23.2-devel is now open on Git main in beginning work towards the Q3'2023 open-source user-space graphics driver stack feature release.

If Mesa 23.1 couldn't get anymore exciting with RADV GPL support enabled by default, more RDNA3 optimizations, continued Zink optimizations, more Intel DG2/Alchemist enhancements, and a load of other features... Support for RadeonSI with the Rusticl Rust-written OpenCL driver has been merged!

For those making use of Mesa's single-file on-disk shader cache, with the upcoming Mesa 23.1 release there will be increased space savings with the Radeon Vulkan (RADV) driver.

Alyssa Rosenzweig who has been leading the Panfrost open-source Arm Mali graphics driver reverse engineering effort the past half-decade is stepping down as maintainer of this driver as part of this also being her last day at Collabora.

In time for the upcoming Mesa 23.1 branching and feature freeze, Samuel Pitoiset of Valve's Linux graphics driver team has enabled the graphics pipeline library "GPL" support by default with the Radeon RADV Vulkan driver.

Another tardy Mesa stable release is now available for those wanting to run the latest open-source OpenGL, Vulkan, OpenCL, and video acceleration code on your Linux systems.

While going back a year there has been "GFX940" open-source driver work happening within the AMDGPU LLVM compiler back-end and AMDGPU/AMDKFD Linux kernel drivers and the like, only this week was support merged for GFX940 into Mesa.

A rather profound change is pending for Mesa 23.1 that should lead to this OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver's memory utilization being cut in half for most games without negatively impacting the performance and likely closing a number of bugs in the process.

It's been one month since the release of Mesa 23.0 while it's finally been succeeded by Mesa 23.0.1 as the first point release containing a wide variety of bug fixes throughout this ecosystem of open-source 3D graphics drivers.

Thanks to the work of Timur Kristóf on Valve's Linux graphics driver team, the RADV driver in Mesa 23.1 this morning received support for Vulkan mesh and task shaders for Radeon RX 7000 series "RDNA3" graphics processors.