Mesa News Archives

Merged yesterday into RADV for Mesa 22.2 is implementing task/mesh shader draw support.

The Mesa Lavapipe driver that provides a CPU-based Vulkan implementation is now officially compliant with the Vulkan 1.3 specification.

Mesa's Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation is finally ready to enable lazy descriptors by default, which in turn will mean better performance for this generic OpenGL implementation across many games/applications.

The rewritten NIR back-end for the R600 Gallium3D driver with a focus on improving performance for old Radeon HD 5000/6000 series hardware has been merged! This also allows proper FP64 usage finally for the Radeon HD 6900 "Cayman" series graphics cards.

Mesa 22.2 as the quarterly feature update to this collection of open-source predominantly OpenGL and Vulkan graphics drivers has been pushed back by two weeks. This delay is for allowing more last minute features to land, which will hopefully ensure that Intel Arc Graphics and RDNA3 support is in better shape for this release.

For those interested in the Etnaviv Gallium3D driver that provides reverse-engineered, open-source OpenGL support for Vivante graphics IP its newest feature is supporting GLSL asynchronous shader compilation.

A decade after Luc Verhaegen started the Lima driver effort for reverse-engineering Arm Mali graphics, developers continue occasionally working on improvements to this Gallium3D driver for older generations of Mali hardware. The most recent feature work is finally enabling 4x MSAA support.

It's been known for a while that The Khronos Group and its Vulkan working group has been working on a cross-vendor extension for mesh shaders akin to what is offered already by Direct3D 12 and with NVIDIA by their VK_NV_mesh_shader extension. A few more details about the forthcoming Vulkan mesh shader support were detailed today.

Earlier this month the TI Sitara AM62 series SoCs were announced for low-power IoT, AI, and other use-cases. While being powered by uninteresting Arm Cortex-A53 cores, with the AM625 SoC part of this new Sitara line-up there is an Imagination PowerVR GPU and that is now being enabled by the new open-source Vulkan driver.

Due to the early state of Imagination's PowerVR Rogue open-source Vulkan driver within Mesa a "hard coding" infrastructure has been added for helping to load hard-coded graphics/compute shaders into this driver until its compiler is far enough along to be useful and mark this infrastructure as unnecessary/redundant.

Venus as the VirtIO-GPU Vulkan driver within Mesa and developed by Google engineers just received a nice speed-up.

Mesa 22.1.2 was released today as the newest routine stable release update for this collection of open-source user-space graphics driver code.

Merged earlier this year into Mesa was "Dozen" for Vulkan on Direct3D 12 for use with Microsoft's Windows Subsystem for Linux or in Windows cases where there may be a D3D12 driver installed but no Vulkan support. This is akin to the layering work Microsoft already supports for leveraging Mesa to provide OpenCL and OpenGL atop Direct3D 12. That "Dozen" driver is now readying Vulkan 1.1 support.

Centralized development around Mesa, the X.Org Server, and dozens of other open-source projects is at a stand-still this weekend due to FreeDesktop.org GitLab crashing with the entire service down.

With the Linux 5.19 merge window past, the initial batch of drm-misc-next feature changes targeting the Linux 5.20 kernel have been mailed in to DRM-Next for queuing until that next kernel merge window kicks off later in the summer.

As added reason for Radeon Linux users to celebrate today beyond Blender 3.2 releasing with AMD HIP Linux render support is that Mesa's Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" continues maturing with its ray-tracing support.

With Panfrost Gallium3D patches landing today into Mesa 22.2 and Panfrost DRM kernel driver support slated to land for the Linux 5.20 cycle later this summer, the Mali G57 GPU has conformant OpenGL ES 3.1 support on this open-source driver and the first Mali GPU of the Valhall generation to have this achievement following the Panfrost driver's successes for the older Bifrost and Midgard architectures.

It's not only the Linux kernel that's been seeing some spring cleaning but Mesa developers have also been quite busy on working to remove some old, poorly maintained code from their open-source 3D driver components.

Last month marked the debut of Mesa 22.1 as the newest quarterly release to this open-source Linux graphics driver stack. For those that prefer waiting until the first point release before upgrading, today is the day with Mesa 22.1.1 now available.

Mesa 22.1 is out today as the newest, quarterly feature update to the open-source OpenGL/Vulkan graphics driver stack that also supports video acceleration and other GPU features on the Linux desktop.

Mesa's Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" continues working on maturing its ray-tracing implementation after the initial code was merged last year. RADV ray-tracing is still treated as experimental and not as reliable as the proprietary NVIDIA Vulkan driver's ray-tracing support that has been around much longer, but it's getting there and at least is open-source -- unlike AMD's official AMDVLK driver that continues to not support Vulkan RT unlike their proprietary driver alternative.

Mesa developer Timothy Arceri of Valve's Linux graphics driver team has added a NIR varying linker for GLSL.

There was hope that Mesa 22.1 would have been released this week but instead it's been diveted to at least next week due to more than 90 patches flowing in the past week. As such, today we have Mesa 22.1-rc5 for another week of testing.

Overnight some notable open-source AMD Radeon graphics driver code was merged into what will be the Mesa 22.2 release next quarter.

Emma Anholt's perseverance the past year has paid off in freeing Mesa of the "glsl_to_tgsi" function with now all Mesa drivers going the route of from GLSL to the NIR intermediate representation. For Mesa drivers lacking native NIR consumption, there is then the NIR-to-TGSI path for going back to that traditional Gallium3D IR.

Rusticl as what started out as a Rust language experiment for Mesa and has now matured into a working OpenCL 3.0 implementation for Mesa drivers is still making progress and on a path towards eventually being mainlined.

Following the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver switching to NIR by default, the VMware SVGA Gallium3D driver has also landed NIR-to-TGSI support in mainline.

Another week of fixes and backports have collected for Mesa 22.1 and now available for testing in the form of Mesa 22.1-rc4.

A change merged to Mesa 22.2 on Thursday adds a Meson build option for being able to optionally control the video codecs supported by Mesa for its video encoding/decoding paths.

One of Mesa's smaller drivers that continues advancing but not receiving as much attention as the big names is Etnaviv for providing open-source, reverse-engineered graphics support for Vivante graphics IP used across different SoCs.

Mesa 22.1 is gearing up for release in early to mid May while out today is the third weekly release candidate. Mesa 22.1-rc3 continues in back-porting many fixes and improvements from the feature code building up for next quarter's Mesa 22.2.

The Panfrost open-source, reverse-engineered Arm Mali driver stack so far has been focused on Midgard and Bifrost architectures but the newer Valhall graphics support is beginning to materialize. Since last year the developers involved have been working heavy on reverse engineering and bringing up Valhall. More of that Valhall driver support landed today.

Mesa's Rusticl is a yet-to-be-merged OpenCL implementation for Mesa Gallium3D drivers written in the Rust programming language. The latest code now can pass the Khronos OpenCL 3.0 Conformance Test Suite!

While to date no major hardware vendors are focusing on their open-source Mesa-based drivers for running on Windows (though there has been independent work like building RADV on Windows), other Mesa code is seeing interest and usage under Windows.

While the Mesa 22.1 feature release will hopefully be out in about two weeks, out today is Mesa 22.0.2 as the newest point release for the current Mesa stable series. With this release slipping an extra week, there are even more bug-fixes than usual back-ported into this version.

Mesa 22.1-rc2 is now available as the second weekly release candidate for this quarter's Mesa3D feature release of this collection of open-source OpenGL/Vulkan graphics drivers.

There is some exciting progress around Zink as the OpenGL 4.6 implementation built atop Vulkan APIs for generally quite performant OpenGL-on-Vulkan acceleration... Zink with the recently-merged Kopper code is even beginning to work on Windows and Laminar Research is hoping to use Zink for the next major X-Plane release!

A project more than one year in the making by Emma Anholt is about to mark its completion with GLSL-to-TGSI set to be removed from Mesa whereby Gallium3D will always go through the NIR intermediate representation while older drivers still dependent upon TGSI will make use of the NIR-To-TGSI pass. Using NIR means better performance and getting rid of the GLSL-to-TGSI code path means freeing up more than twenty thousand lines of code.

Following yesterday's Mesa 22.1 code branching / feature freeze, Mesa 22.1-rc1 was released this afternoon as the first step towards releasing Mesa 22.1 next month. Mesa 22.1 is bringing improvements for old NVIDIA graphics on open-source, many Radeon "RADV" Vulkan enhancements, a lot of work as always on the Intel side, the new Imagination Rogue PowerVR driver, and much more.

As anticipated the code for Mesa 22.1 has now been branched with the first release candidate imminent for this quarterly Mesa3D update.

With Mesa 22.1 due to be branched in the next day or so as the feature freeze for this quarterly Mesa update, Valve developer Mike Blumenkrantz has penned a new blog post outlining all of the Zink changes accomplished this cycle.

Merged into Mesa 22.1-devel this morning is Kopper, a big improvement particularly for the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver code.

At the end of March Ubuntu 22.04 "Jammy Jellyfish" successfully transitioned from the former Mesa 21.3 series to Mesa 22.0 as the current stable series for these open-source OpenGL/Vulkan drivers. There are also a few changes to mention with Ubuntu 22.04's Mesa support this LTS cycle.

Ahead of the upcoming Mesa 22.1 feature freeze, the Mesa Vulkan drivers both big and small have been preparing merge requests for wiring up a number of recently introduced Vulkan extensions.

It's coming a week late due to a scheduling mishap but in any event today marks the first stable point release to the Mesa 22.0 series for open-source OpenGL/Vulkan drivers.

Merged a few minutes ago into Mesa 22.1 is the "Dozen" project implementing Vulkan atop Direct3D 12 APIs.

In addition to the Imagination PowerVR Series 1 code drop of their late 90's era driver code, Imagination Tech has managed to successfully land its new PowerVR Rogue "PVR" Vulkan driver in time for Mesa 22.1's release next quarter.

The recent work around Lavapipe picking up many new Vulkan extensions is culminating with Vulkan 1.3 support for this CPU-based Vulkan software implementation.

It's arguably long overdue, but landing today within Mesa 22.1 is support in the V3D driver for Mesa's on-disk shader cache functionality. By adding this shader cache to V3D it can help with the performance of this Gallium3D open-source driver most notably used by the Raspberry Pi 4 and newer single board computers.

Mesa has long had the OpenCL "Clover" Gallium3D state tracker that has supported OpenCL 1.x but lacked important extensions that impaired its practicality. With AMD backing their ROCm compute stack in more recent years and Intel going with their Compute-Runtime stack for oneAPI and OpenCL support, there also isn't a major backer to Clover besides Red Hat engineers and the community. Now though "Rusticl" has been published as a new Mesa OpenCL implementation written in the Rust programming language.