Mesa News Archives

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.

The Freedreno Gallium3D driver that provides reverse-engineered, open-source OpenGL support for Qualcomm Adreno GPUs is now capable of OpenGL 4.5 with the Adreno 600 series graphics processors.

Merged this morning into Mesa 22.3 are some adjustments to Intel's open-source "ANV" Vulkan driver for delivering better Vulkan mesh shading performance with Arc Graphics hardware.

Adding to the long list of Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver improvements coming with Mesa 22.3 this quarter is now a working Mesa front-end shader caching implementation.

Mesa's Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has been enjoying many performance optimizations and other improvements in recent months around its ray-tracing capabilities. Merged today is another significant optimization to better the Radeon Vulkan ray-tracing support and coming days ahead of AMD's RDNA3 announcement.

Earlier this month one of the interesting milestones for Mesa's Rust-based OpenCL "Rusticl" implementation was getting Rusticl running on Zink so that this OpenCL implementation was running atop this Gallium3D driver in turn running atop a bare metal Vulkan driver. As of yesterday some of that necessary code was merged to Mesa 22.3.

After the idea has been discussed for about a year, Mesa 22.3 has landed a new performance option called "block_on_depleted_buffers" to wait on buffers at the end of a swap to reduce latency -- a possible one frame advantage.

After being worked on the past year, Mesa 22.3 has landed support for Wayland's DMA-BUF Feedback extension for use by the Mesa Vulkan drivers with the Vulkan windowing system integration (WSI) code.

The very promising Rusticl Rust-based OpenCL implementation within Mesa has landed a set of patches today that make it easier to enable the OpenCL compute device support with the various Gallium3D drivers.

If you habitually ride Mesa Git for the latest and greatest open-source AMD Radeon graphics driver code and use the KDE Plasma desktop with Wayland, you may have noticed a glitchy cursor recently. Fortunately, that's now fixed up with today's Mesa Git code and ended up stemming from the recent global enabling of Mesa OpenGL threading.

Two weeks ago a bunch of old Mesa code got removed including the XvMC front-end, Rbug as a remote debugging interface, and some of Graw that was to serve as a raw Gallium3D interface without a traditional Gallium front-end. Some of Graw was accidentally left in the source tree while now that has been caught and eliminated in further lightening the size of Mesa.

Merged for Mesa 22.3 one month ago was Rusticl as a new OpenCL implementation written in Rust. Since then Karol Herbst of Red Hat, who has led the work on this new driver front-end, has been working to get Rusticl running on more Gallium3D drivers and even atop Zink for execution with Vulkan drivers. Much of his testing/focus so far has been making use of integrated GPUs while an important patch series was merged this evening for discrete GPU fixes.

For those that have been holding off on upgrading to the Mesa 22.2 open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers until the first point release arrives with any early fixes and fallout corrections, that v22.2.1 release is now available.

Mesa's Zink driver implementing the OpenGL API atop Vulkan continues advancing at a rapid pace and today the latest major addition landed: async pipeline precompiles.

Erik Faye-Lund of Collabora raised an interesting discussion this past week at XDC 2022 about leveraging Zink for post-OpenGL graphics development. With Zink able to run "anywhere" and currently focused on existing OpenGL APIs atop Vulkan, Zink could be used as a vehicle for developing new OpenGL APIs or trying to evolve the API in its own right while being able to run atop Vulkan API drivers on Windows or Linux.

Red Hat's Karol Herbst has managed to get his Rust-based OpenCL implementation "Rusticl" running atop the Zink Gallium3D driver that in turn runs atop Vulkan drivers.

Merged last month into Mesa 22.3 was Rusticl as a Rust-written OpenCL implementation for Gallium3D that is beginning to work with the open-source Radeon Linux driver, the Intel "Iris" Gallium3D driver, and others. This is also the first Rust-written component within the Mesa code-base. Karol Herbst of Red Hat who has led Rusticl development presented this week in Minnesota on this promising cross-vendor OpenCL implementation that may also support SYCL in the future.

Well known Zink developer Mike Blumenkrantz, working for Valve on improving Mesa's OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver, has kicked off October by removing a lot of old Mesa code.

Recently the open-source AMD OpenGL driver "RadeonSI" enabled OpenGL threading by default for the "glthread" option that has long been opt-in on a per-game/app basis. Along with that has been a number of glthread-related improvements to this code that punts executing OpenGL calls to a separate CPU thread. The Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver has now unconditionally enabled OpenGL threading too.

Last week I wrote about how Microsoft landed a VA-API improvement in Mesa to support faster Video Acceleration API encoding with FFmpeg. That code was initially only wired up for the Microsoft D3D12 driver within Mesa for WSL use-cases, but now AMD has taken advantage of the new capability for RadeonSI Gallium3D usage with their Radeon GPUs.

Rusticl as the Rust-written OpenCL implementation for Mesa's Gallium3D as a newer and modern-focused CL alternative to the existing "Clover" code may soon see mainline support for working with the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver for supporting modern AMD graphics processors.

A Microsoft engineer has landed an improvement to the Mesa Gallium3D Video Acceleration "VA" state tracker that can allow for faster video processing times and greater GPU utilization.

Turnip as the Mesa Vulkan driver for Qualcomm Adreno graphics is now able to support Vulkan 1.3.

The belated Mesa 22.2 was unexpectedly released today for providing the very latest open-source Linux graphics driver support not only for Intel and AMD Radeon graphics hardware but also the reverse-engineered Nouveau (NVIDIA) driver and the many smaller drivers like Etnaviv, Mali, Panfrost, the new PowerVR Vulkan driver, and the software drivers like LLVMpipe and Zink.

In addition to Microsoft continuing to work on OpenGL and OpenCL atop Direct3D 12 by leveraging Mesa in order to benefit Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2) and related use-cases, Microsoft engineers have also been working on exposing video acceleration to Linux software backed by Direct3D 12 Video Acceleration.

As a follow-up to the recent article about Mesa preparing a software fallback for S3TC, that code was merged for next quarter's Mesa 22.3.

AMD Linux graphics driver engineer Pierre-Eric Pelloux-Prayer has made an improvement to Mesa's common code that should yield much faster start-up times for Valve's Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.

Development on Zink as the OpenGL implementation atop the Vulkan API within Mesa remains very vibrant with a lot of optimizations and other improvements ongoing.

Karol Herbst of Red Hat has seen his new "Rusticl" implementation merged into mainline Mesa! Mesa 22.3 next quarter will introduce this new Rust-written OpenCL 3.0 implementation that will hopefully be more successful than the existing Gallium3D "Clover" OpenCL driver.

The latest open-source Radeon Vulkan driver work for Mesa 22.3's RADV is enabling 3D sparse image support.

Mesa recently landed BPTC software fallback handling that is a requirement for OpenGL 4.2 support but BPTC is not natively supported by all GPU hardware, particularly on the embedded side. That software emulation support for BPTC is similar to what already has existed within Mesa for the ASTC and ETC formats too. A merge request is pending that also adds S3TC software fallback handling, which helps out some of the smaller, embedded GPU drivers too for getting more games running that are dependent on S3 Texture Compression.

Being merged a few minutes ago into Mesa 22.3 is the Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" support for the recently ratified mesh shader extension.

As part of experimenting with using Rust code inside Mesa, longtime Mesa developer Karol Herbst of Red Hat has been developing Rusticl as a new Rust-based OpenCL implementation for Gallium3D and an alternative to the long-standing "Clover" OpenCL state tracker. That Rusticl code with the initial Rust infrastructure for Mesa is expected to be merged in the coming days.

An independent contributor to the open-source Mesa 3D graphics project has begun eyeing AVX-512 support by the LLVMpipe software rasterizer due to AVX-512 being present with the new AMD Ryzen 7000 series "Zen 4" processors.

When currently using Intel's open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers on Linux with their new Arc Graphics discrete GPUs, it's simply been reported as "Intel{R} Graphics" for the product/renderer string. With the latest Mesa 22.3-devel work and for back-porting to the current stable series, the graphics card models are beginning to be properly reported.

Valve contractor Mike Blumenkrantz who continues to be focused on the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan code tacked on the latest feature for Mesa 22.3.

For speeding up the actual Mesa continuous integration (CI) process itself with frequently building new revisions of Mesa3D, their CI infrastructure is beginning to make use of the Mold linker as a high performance alternative to the GNU Gold and LLVM LLD linkers. This is yielding a "substantial" performance improvement in tests for being able to turnaround CI jobs faster and in turn allowing Mesa developers to be more efficient.

Alyssa Rosenzweig who is known for her work on the Panfrost open-source, reverse-engineered Arm Mali driver and has been spending nearly two years now involved with the Asahi Linux crew working on reverse-engineered Apple M1/M2 graphics support has shared a new status update.

The open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver "NVK" being developed for Mesa has seen a busy week of new development activity on this work-in-progress solution.

The latest Mesa 22.3-devel code for Zink's OpenGL on Vulkan implementation has hit an important milestone with the latest code refactoring: it looks like this OpenGL implementation atop the Vulkan API with the RADV driver is beginning to outpace AMD's RadeonSI Gallium3D driver providing native OpenGL support for Radeon GPUs.

The third weekly release candidate of Mesa 22.2 is now available for testing ahead of the stable debut in the coming weeks.

Valve contractor Mike Blumenkrantz who works on Zink for OpenGL implemented atop Vulkan has managed some more performance optimizations with the upcoming Mesa 22.2 quarterly feature release.

Following last week's branching and feature freeze along with the Mesa 22.2-rc1 release, released on Wednesday evening was Mesa 22.2-rc2 as the first week's worth of bug fixing.

After a few week delay to allow additional features to land, feature development on Mesa 22.2 has ended with Mesa 22.2-rc1 now being available ahead of its stable release in the coming weeks.

Merged in early July to Mesa 22.2 was the rewritten R600g NIR back-end for improving older AMD Radeon HD 5000/6000 series graphics cards on Linux with this open-source OpenGL driver. That NIR code was limited to "newer" Radeon GPUs supported by the R600g driver while now it's been extended for supporting pre-Evergreen GPUs too.

Mesa's Turnip driver that provides open-source Vulkan support for Qualcomm Adreno graphics processors continues maturing nicely and is approaching Vulkan 1.3 conformance.