Mesa News Archives

As a public service announcement for those using the "MESA_GLSL_CACHE" environment variable for controlling where your graphics driver shader cache resides or using "MESA_GLSL_CACHE_DISABLE" for forcing off this on-disk shader cache, the environment variables have been renamed.

Mesa developer Mike Blumenkrantz who is employed by Valve and known for his work on the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan work has recently been working on enhancements to Lavapipe.

Panfrost's PanVK Vulkan driver for Arm Mali graphics hardware had been exposing Vulkan API 1.1 support but that was premature and has now been reverted to Vulkan 1.0.

Mesa 22.0 is out today as the quarterly feature update to this collection of open-source OpenGL and Vulkan graphics drivers used widely by Linux systems.

PanVK as Panfrost's open-source Vulkan driver in Mesa for Arm Mali graphics hardware is seeing progress on handling compute shaders.

Back in 2017 the Mesa open-source OpenGL driver for Broadcom VC5 hardware most notably used by the Raspberry Pi 4 aimed to enable anisotropic filtering (AF). However, that patch wasn't fully hooked up correctly and now this past week should be in good shape.

Mesa's Venus driver providing VirtIO-GPU Vulkan support that was developed by Google as part of the Virgil effort for 3D acceleration within guest VMs can now run ANGLE. Google's ANGLE in turn is their OpenGL ES conformant implementation that can run atop Vulkan / Metal / OpenGL / Direct3D interfaces.

As part of AMD's new approach for quietly bringing up new graphics hardware support within their open-source Linux graphics driver, today AMD landed new graphics chip support within their RadeonSI Gallium3D driver.

LLVMpipe as the software OpenGL implementation that runs atop the CPU and Lavapipe as the Vulkan equivalent have seen a recent uptick in activity.

Red Hat's David Airlie continues carrying out almost magical work on the open-source Linux graphics stack. Reviving some work he originally started a while back, patches pending for Mesa allow speeding up the software-based LLVMpipe OpenGL driver for vertex and fragment shader processing.

V3DV as the open-source Vulkan driver within Mesa for Broadcom VideoCore hardware is most notably used by the Raspberry Pi 4 and newer. This Vulkan driver continues improving with likely this year to bring more performance optimizations and possibly work on Vulkan 1.2 conformance.

Mesa's NIR bandwagon continues moving around with the Etnaviv Gallium3D driver now being the latest to outright remove its Gallium3D TGSI back-end in favor of going purely with NIR for its driver intermediate representation.

The newest code Microsoft has contributed to Mesa for its D3D12 driver, which is used for running OpenGL / OpenGL ES / OpenCL (and eventually Vulkan) over Direct3D 12 for use on Windows and WSL2, is Direct3D residency management support.

At this past weekend's FOSDEM 2022 virtual event, a status update was provided on Mesa's "TURNIP" Vulkan open-source driver that provides accelerated support for Qualcomm Adreno graphics.

In a short period of time Microsoft's D3D12 Gallium3D driver has gone from implementing OpenGL 3.3 atop the Direct3D 12 interface to now having working OpenGL 4.2 support.

A new merge request for Linux's open-source Mesa graphics driver stack would provide a new 3dfx Glide API implementation that would work on modern GPUs backed by Mesa's Gallium3D drivers. This implementation of the 3dfx graphics API from the 1990s is implemented using the modern Rust programming language.

After a three week delay to the Mesa 22.0 schedule to allow Vulkan 1.3 to land among other last minute features, the code was branched today that marks the end of feature development on this quarterly Mesa3D driver stack. Mesa 22.0 stable should be out in a few weeks time and with it comes many new features to this collection of open-source OpenGL/Vulkan drivers predominantly used on Linux systems but of growing use on Windows with the D3D12 driver and other platforms.

Prominent Mesa developer Jason Ekstrand who formerly led Intel's "ANV" Vulkan driver effort and being one of their open-source driver developers originally involved with the NIR intermediate representation work wrote a detailed and excellent blog post outlining its successes eight years running. While it still gets brought up into discussions from time to time (including quite recently stemming from a RISC-V graphics thread) why Mesa doesn't use LLVM IR or SPIR-V directly as its intermediate representation, NIR continues as a striking success and used by all major Mesa drivers.

In addition to this week seeing Raptor Lake S support added for Mesa 22.0, the Alder Lake N additions have also been merged for this quarter's Mesa update.

Yet another open-source Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver improvement being worked on by Valve's engineers is around better controlling variable rate shading "VRS" behavior with a focus on improving power savings for the Steam Deck.

Landing today for Mesa 22.0 was a fix for Vulkan ray-tracing with the RADV driver in the RDNA Wave32 shader mode and then switching to Wave32 by default for ray-tracing on RDNA/RDNA2 GPUs.

When it comes to OpenGL extension support, the Zink generic OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation now has as robust coverage as core Mesa offers and what is implemented by the LLVMpipe software driver, RadeonSI Gallium3D, and the Intel i965 drivers.

VMware has been preparing support for OpenGL 4.3 to be exposed within their VMware virtualization software so that guest VMs can enjoy newer OpenGL support that is accelerated by the host.

Jason Ekstrand who was the lead developer of Intel's open-source "ANV" Vulkan Linux driver left Intel in December and has now revealed details about his new role.

Mesa's V3D and V3DV drivers providing open-source OpenGL and Vulkan driver support, respectively, for newer Broadcom VideoCore hardware now has a double buffer mode implemented. This is a win for numerous workloads for these drivers most notably used by modern Raspberry Pi single board computers.

A draft merge request has been opened for landing "Copper" within Mesa.

While a lot of open-source OpenGL and Vulkan driver improvements have been landing in recent days in anticipation of the Mesa 22.0 code branching and feature freeze for Wednesday, that deadline has now been extended by three weeks.

While RADV is not AMD's official Radeon Vulkan driver for Linux systems, for Mesa 22.0 they have contributed a set of optimizations to improve the "DRI_PRIME" performance for hybrid GPU setups such as the growing number of AMD powered notebooks with discrete graphics.

After the many years now that AMD's RadeonSI Gallium3D driver has been seeing relentless optimizations for GCN and now RDNA GPUs paired with the fact more Linux games targeting Vulkan (or going through Direct3D to Vulkan), one might think in 2022 that the OpenGL driver optimization efforts would let up... But that doesn't appear to be the case with well known AMD RadeonSI developer Marek Olšák pursuing yet more optimizations.

After taking a roughly month-long holiday, Mike Blumenkrantz -- who has been leading the work on Mesa's Zink generic OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation for Valve -- is back at the game.

Mesa's Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" now is making use of the common synchronization framework started by Intel "ANV" Vulkan driver developers to allow for more code sharing between the drivers.

As one of the last major feature changes heading into Mesa Git this calendar year, RadeonSI Gallium3D as the open-source OpenGL driver for modern AMD Radeon GPUs there is now sparse texture support.

For those sticking to stable Mesa point releases, Mesa 21.3.3 is out today to close out the year. Notable with Mesa 21.3.3 is the large number of fixes for older ATI Radeon R300 through R500 (X1000 series) GPU fixes with the R300 Gallium3D driver.

Last year there was some work for getting Gallium3D Zink working on macOS for this OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation to in turn run it atop the MoltenVK library for translating the Vulkan calls to Apple's Metal graphics/compute API. That work fell into disrepair but now the fixed up code for allowing Zink to build on Apple's operating system has been merged into Mesa 22.0.

As we approach the end of the year, here is a look back at some of the Mesa open-source 3D OpenGL/Vulkan driver development statistics for 2021 compared to prior years as well as a look at the top contributors to this crucial piece of the Linux desktop stack.

The open-source Broadcom "V3DV" Vulkan driver within Mesa that is most notably used by the Raspberry Pi can now run on Android.

Adding to the growing list of Mesa 22.0 features are more Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver improvements to help with gaming performance.

Amazon has passed along word that they are hiring for Linux gaming engineers that are experienced in the likes of Valve's DXVK and Proton efforts as well as being experienced with the Mesa open-source graphics drivers, Vulkan, and more.

The open-source Radeon Linux graphics driver work covered yesterday about a big optimization by leveraging NIR and going through that intermediate representation and relying on common NIR optimizations has now been merged into Mesa 22.0. This is a step-up from the existing open-source OpenGL driver support for old Radeon 9500 through Radeon X1000 series (R500) graphics processors. A similar conversion is also planned for the old Nouveau driver handling NVIDIA "NV30" era graphics processors too.

While earlier this year AMD dropped pre-Polaris support from their mainline Radeon Software Windows driver, under Linux with open-source software older GPUs can live on much longer with superior driver support... Pending for Mesa 22.0 and as a surprise Christmas gift for those with nearly two decade old GPUs, a big optimization is pending for those with ATI Radeon R300/R400/R500 series graphics cards still in operation.

It is not too often getting to talk about performance optimizations for Mesa's Virgl code that along with in conjunction with related "Virgil" components allows for hardware-accelerated 3D/OpenGL running within virtual machines. Hitting Mesa 22.0 this week though is some Virgl code improvements for allowing lower memory use within virtual machines.

Last Friday Mesa classic drivers were removed from the mainline code-base and punted off to an "Amber" code branch where they will receive whatever attention moving forward. With that classic Mesa code removed, more code cleaning is now happening on top of the tens of thousands of lines of code already removed. Intel's OpenSWR driver has also now been removed from mainline.

The Panfrost Gallium3D OpenGL driver and PanVK open-source drivers in Mesa have come a long way via reverse-engineering for Arm Mali graphics support. However, to this point the focus has been on Arm's "Midgard" and "Bifrost" architectures while the newer "Valhall" architecture has been around the past two years. The Panfrost effort for bringing up Valhall is now getting underway.

Landing in Mesa 22.0 on Sunday night was the Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" support for the recently introduced VK_KHR_dynamic_rendering extension.

The day has finally come that Mesa's classic OpenGL drivers (non-Gallium3D) have been cleared out of the code-base as part of their modernization effort for mainline.

TURNIP as the open-source Mesa Vulkan driver for Qualcomm Adreno graphics hit a new official milestone this week.

Landing in Mesa on Black Friday was DMA-BUF Feedback support within the EGL code as another important step forward for Wayland.

With Mesa 21.3 having released last week and its first point release due next week, Mesa 21.2.6 has been published as likely the last update to that N-1 series for these open-source OpenGL/Vulkan drivers.

Well known AMD OpenGL open-source driver developer Marek Olšák managed to land yet more performance optimizations this week into Mesa 22.0.

Following experimental Zink work to improve the NVIDIA driver support as part of the broader Copper initiative that also allows running Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan for Wayland's Weston compositor, another milestone has now been reached.