Mesa News Archives

A two year old merge request finally made it to mainline today for Mesa 23.1 to enhance in profiling the open-source Mesa Vulkan drivers.

David Airlie has managed to get some early code in place for handling VP9 video decoding with Vulkan using the Mesa RADV driver. This early Vulkan Video VP9 support also is accompanied by an FFmpeg branch supporting this experimental Mesa extension.

Mesa 22.3.7 has been released as the last planned point release for that driver Q4'2022 driver series.

While the open-source Mesa 3D drivers are most well known for use on Linux, they are used by other platforms too like Haiku, the BSDs, and even Microsoft Windows with WSL and the like. For those making use of the Mesa 3D drivers on the BeOS-inspired Haiku operating system to enjoy OpenGL support, merged for Mesa 23.1 is an improved EGL implementation for that platform.

The Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" is seeing work towards being able to support Direct3D 12 Feature Level 12.2 with VKD3D-Proton to further enhance the Steam Play gaming experience on Linux.

Merged this past week into Mesa 23.1 is initial support for Loongson's LoongArch CPU architecture.

Merged on Thursday to Mesa 23.1 was implementing VK_EXT_pipeline_library_group_handles using hashed stages with support for caching and replay. What makes this work notable is that it in turn allows the popular game Cyberpunk 2077 running with Steam Play / VKD3D-Proton on Linux to begin enjoying ray-tracing support.

Yet another Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver optimization has landed in Mesa 23.1 ahead of its official release next quarter.

After a lengthy release cycle due to blocker bugs and delays in issuing new release candidates, Mesa 23.0 was released overnight as the newest version of this collection of open-source graphics drivers used on Linux and other platforms.

The Mesa 23.1 graphics driver code has added support for software-based decoding of Adaptive Scalable Texture Compression (ASTC) textures via compute shaders.

It's been a while since there has been any major additions to Mesa's Rusticl OpenCL implementation led by Red Hat's Karol Herbst while today he merged support for SPIR-V programs to this Rust-written driver. This SPIR-V support is necessary for eventually supporting SYCL and HIP.

For fans of the Doom (2016) video game looking to enjoy the title with the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation, a simple fix showed how addressing a simple oversight can boost the performance by a magnitude of 10x.

While there is Rusticl as the first Rust language code within Mesa as a modern OpenCL implementation in Gallium3D, for possible future driver efforts there is some initial exploratory work being done around coming up with bindings to support writing of Vulkan drivers with Rust.

The work on the Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" around fast-linking with the graphics pipeline library (GPL) extension continues as the Linux graphics driver developers at Valve continue making remarkable progress.

While the Mesa 23.0 graphics drivers were aiming for release this week, due to outstanding blocker bugs it has instead resulted in a fourth weekly release candidate.

An optimization to Mesa's shader database cache eviction handling has been merged to Mesa 23.1 with a focus on benefiting Steam's shader pre-caching.

Code merged last week to Mesa 23.1 by AMD ensures that a linear copy buffer is made on the display/scanout GPU when dealing with EGL contexts under Wayland or X11. This follows an optimization made last year to Mesa's GLX code within X.Org environments for enhancing the PRIME/multi-GPU support.

For fans of the RAGE 2 first person shooter game as the sequel to id Software's Rage game from nearly a decade ago, the latest Mesa Git code has landed a fix courtesy of Valve's Linux graphics driver developers to correct the rendering.

While Mesa 23.0 will hopefully be out next week, Mesa 22.3.4 was released today as the newest bi-weekly stable bug-fix release for the open-source Mesa 3D drivers.

Barring any release-blocking issues from coming up in the next week, Mesa 23.0 aims for its official release while 23.0-rc3 is now available for last minute testing.

Linux game porter and developer Ethan Lee has added initial support to Mesa for Microsoft's Xbox Game Development Kit (GDK). In turn this early code can allow running the "GLon12" Mesa driver atop the Xbox One and Xbox Series X / S game consoles that can ease porting OpenGL games to the Xbox.

The Windows game Control that runs via Valve's Steam Play no longer needs the RADV_PERFTEST=rt environment variable override to enjoy the ray-tracing support but with Mesa 23.1 (and potentially backported for 23.0) will work out-of-the-box.

While the Vulkan Video extensions were introduced provisionally nearly two years ago and Vulkan Video 1.0 firmed up in December, sadly to date they have been focused on H.264 and H.265 video acceleration. VP9 and AV1 extensions for Vulkan Video are expected in 2023, but in advance of the cross-vendor extensions, VK_MESA_video_decode_av1 has been devised as an extension enabling RADV accelerated video decode with AMD Radeon GPUs.

Following Thursday's Mesa 23.0 feature freeze / branching, Friday brought the first weekly release candidate of this new Mesa 23.0 series.

Mesa 23.0 feature development wrapped up today with the code having been branched from the main branch and now Mesa 23.1 entering development.

For those sticking to the bi-weekly Mesa 22.3 point releases rather than riding Mesa Git, Mesa 22.3.3 is out today in providing the very latest fixes to this collection of open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers.

After enjoying a two month holiday, Valve-funded Mike Blumenkrantz is back to working on Mesa's Zink code that implements OpenGL (and via Rusticl even OpenCL) atop the Vulkan API. Zink has shown it can be quite competitive in its OpenGL performance atop Vulkan compared to dedicated OpenGL drivers and in 2023 should be maturing into even better shape.

For those Linux gamers and enthusiasts using the current Mesa 22.3 series, Mesa 22.3.2 was released this New Year's Eve for delivering the latest batch of open-source OpenGL and Vulkan driver fixes.

Valve developers investing heavily into the open-source 3D graphics driver stack, AMD continuing their big contributions to Mesa, the Apple AGX Gallium3D driver taking shape, Microsoft continuing to leverage Mesa for various purposes on Windows, Zink maturing for OpenGL atop Vulkan, and other efforts all culminated with the most ever code growth to Mesa in a single year as well as nearly the most ever commits to this 3D graphics driver project.

As of today with Mesa 23.0 Git the EXT_mesh_shader extension is finally enabled by default for AMD Radeon RX 6000 "RDNA2" graphics hardware when running on a new Linux kernel build.

Well known Mesa developer Marek Olšák has for years meticulously optimized the RadeonSI driver and before that R600g and R300g where he got his start as a student developer. Besides ensuring the AMD Radeon OpenGL performance is in great shape for Linux gaming, he's also spent much time more recently in focusing on workstation OpenGL performance and with that the common SPECViewPerf benchmark. This week he landed another set of patches providing around a 7.5% improvement for one of the SPECViewPerf tests.

Interest and support around Vulkan Video for adding GPU-accelerated video encode/decode to the Vulkan API has been (sadly) rather slow. But at least the Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has seen some new work around enabling H.264 and H.265 video decoding over Vulkan Video.

For those that prefer waiting for the first Mesa point release in a new series before moving to it, Mesa 22.3 is now on the table with Mesa 22.3.1 having been released on Wednesday.

Mesa's Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver is making progress on being able to run the new Portal RTX game.

The belated Mesa 22.2.5 is now available as the last planned point release to the Mesa 22.2 series.

Thanks to the work led by Valve engineers on the open-source Linux graphics stack, Mesa 23.0 continues picking up new features for the Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver.

Intel engineers have been busy bringing up Meteor Lake support for Linux from the improved integrated graphics to other areas of this next-gen Core processor that will eventually succeed Raptor Lake. In addition to heavy and ongoing work with the i915 kernel graphics driver, the initial Meteor Lake support has been merged now for Mesa.

Mesa 22.3 is now officially available as the newest quarterly feature release for this set of open-source user-space graphics driver components.

Landing this week within Mesa 23.0 is an initial implementation of Vulkan's VK_KHR_present_wait extension, which Hans-Kristian Arntzen of Valve's Linux team and VKD3D-Proton notoriety has referred to as a "very useful" extension but due to current spec limitations is for now only being made opt-in via a DriConf option so it can be handled on a per-game/app basis.

Mesa 22.3 had been expected to release this week but instead Mesa 22.3-rc4 was issued and in turn the v22.3 introduction is now expected for next week.

Introduced last week as part of Vulkan 1.3.235 was the new VK_EXT_descriptor_buffer extension. NVIDIA issued a same-day Vulkan beta with support for this new capability while now the open-source Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has added support for it too and there is also VKD3D-Proton usage for this new extension pending.

Mesa VirGL with the virglrenderer library has allowed for virtual 3D GPU support within QEMU virtual machines. This Gallium3D-leveraging code has allowed for OpenGL and other functionality to work within VMs while leveraging the host's GPU. The latest notable addition is adding VirGL video encoding support with H.264 and H.265 initially being supported for accelerated support in VMs.

Barring any unforeseen issues from coming about, Mesa 22.3 will hopefully be released next week.

Mesa's AGX "Asahi" Gallium3D driver for providing OpenGL / GLES support on Apple M1/M2 SoCs has begun making some early preparatory changes for eventually supporting the in-development DRM/KMS kernel driver. The kernel driver is still a work-in-progress and not close to being merged yet and the user-space API not yet set in stone, but some early changes in better preparing the Mesa driver for actually running on the Apple Silicon hardware under Linux have been merged.

The latest milestone for Rusticl as Mesa's Rust-written OpenCL Gallium3D implementation is that -- when running on Intel Gen12 Xe graphics -- has reached official OpenCL 3.0 conformance as recognized by The Khronos Group.

Following last week's release of Mesa 22.3-rc1 that also marked the feature freeze for this quarter's release cycle, Mesa 22.3-rc2 is out today with an initial batch of bug fixes.

New to the upcoming Mesa 22.3 release is Rusticl as a Rust-written OpenCL implementation for Mesa drivers. Rusticl supports OpenCL 3.0, handles OpenCL images and other features, works with multiple drivers, and is modern and maintained. Already among Mesa developers is a discussion that has begun around removing the older "Clover" OpenCL Gallium3D implementation once Rusticl has firmly hit parity with that older, unmaintained state tracker.

One of the last features to land in Mesa 22.3 prior to yesterday's branching and Mesa 22.3-rc1 release is enabling the Mesa shader disk cache for Panfrost, the Arm Mali open-source driver for Midgard and Bifrost generations.

Feature work on Mesa 22.3 has now concluded as this quarter's feature release to this collection of open-source OpenGL, OpenCL, and Vulkan drivers. Mesa 22.3 was branched this afternoon and Mesa 22.3-rc1 now issued as the first weekly test release leading up to the stable debut in a few weeks.

Ahead of AMD's RDNA3 announcement for tomorrow, 3 November, the Mesa 22.3 open-source Radeon graphics driver code continues seeing more RDNA3/GFX11 enablement work landing.