NVK Vulkan Driver Lands DRM Format Modifiers Support

[phoronix]

Phoronix: NVK Vulkan Driver Lands DRM Format Modifiers Support

After the 22 patches were under review for the past eight months, merged today is the NVK Vulkan driver support for the VK_EXT_image_drm_format_modifier extension for handling DRM format modifiers...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/NVK-DRM-Modifiers-Land

[SteamPunker]

If the Nouveau Gallium3D driver is indeed so broken, maybe the development of NVK provides an opportunity to start from a clean slate? Just focus on developing the best possible open source Vulkan driver for NVIDIA hardware and let Zink handle all the OpenGL stuff, since that project has already proven to be potentially as performant as a native OpenGL driver.

[dragon321]

If the Nouveau Gallium3D driver is indeed so broken, maybe the development of NVK provides an opportunity to start from a clean slate? Just focus on developing the best possible open source Vulkan driver for NVIDIA hardware and let Zink handle all the OpenGL stuff, since that project has already proven to be potentially as performant as a native OpenGL driver.

If I'm not mistaken this is exactly what Nouveau developers intents to do. Nouveau Gallium3D is not getting tons of activity, most of the development goes to NVK. NVK with Zink is already way faster than Gallium3D on Nouveau. I guess there is possibility that Nova won't even support Nouveau Gallium3D.

[MastaG]

If I'm not mistaken this is exactly what Nouveau developers intents to do. Nouveau Gallium3D is not getting tons of activity, most of the development goes to NVK. NVK with Zink is already way faster than Gallium3D on Nouveau. I guess there is possibility that Nova won't even support Nouveau Gallium3D.

This means that sooner or later distros will ship nvk + zink (for opengl)..
Even if it only matches 70% performance of nvidia's binary driver, most non-power/tweaker endusers won't bother to install it any longer.
I wonder what nvidia thinks of this.
Perhaps they'll become like AMD and occasionally contribute to nvk while other parties such as Valve do the heavy lifting.

[scottishduck]

Super promising future for nvidia on Linux. We’ve got nouveau + nvk already in a nice and rapidly improving place, zink should be able to pick up the slack from the wonky galium3d driver.

Then in the future we can have nova on the kernel side to improve things even further.

I wouldn’t be surprised to see nvidia slowly start to contribute more to these drivers as time goes on. They were pretty clear the open kernel modules are difficult or even impossible to merge into mainline, but they have opened the door for this promising future.

[smitty3268]

If the Nouveau Gallium3D driver is indeed so broken, maybe the development of NVK provides an opportunity to start from a clean slate? Just focus on developing the best possible open source Vulkan driver for NVIDIA hardware and let Zink handle all the OpenGL stuff, since that project has already proven to be potentially as performant as a native OpenGL driver.

If I'm not mistaken this is exactly what Nouveau developers intents to do. Nouveau Gallium3D is not getting tons of activity, most of the development goes to NVK. NVK with Zink is already way faster than Gallium3D on Nouveau. I guess there is possibility that Nova won't even support Nouveau Gallium3D.

FYI, it looks like they're just about to flip over to zink by default: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/...requests/29232

Based on that MR, I guess this drm format modifier support must be important to get zink to perform well.

[Developer12]

The problem is that Nova only supports 20XX series and above, and NVK only supports back to like maxwell or kepler(?).

There are a TON of cards and iGPUs out there that won't be supported by Nova and almost as many that won't be supported by NVK. The only option for those cards it to run openGL on top of the gallium backend. That's it.

That means that the nouveau gallium backend and openGL aren't going anywhere. They might split things like the "frozen in amber" drivers so that nouveau exclusively supports everything pre-20XX and nova supports 20XX+, but that still leaves a bunch of pre-20XX cards on nouveau that may or may not support NVK.

Hopefully the renewed interest in NVK on nouveau cards results in long-needed cleanups to nouveau, but I'm not holding my breath.

[toughy]

I wish more fixes went into nouveau and Gallium3D before they decided to split to nova, and leave nouveau behind in a semi-working condition ...