Mesa's Lavapipe Adds Vulkan Task/Mesh Shader Support

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Mesa's Lavapipe Adds Vulkan Task/Mesh Shader Support

David Airlie has managed to hack together task/mesh shader support inside Lavapipe, the CPU-based software Vulkan implementation inside Mesa...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Lavapipe-Does-Mesh-Shaders

[stompcrash]

Mesa has always had a software implementation of OpenGL and now Vulkan, but I wonder as to its value now vs. Mesa's early days. Initially, Mesa software rendering was good because graphics card drivers on Linux were poor or nonexistent, and rendering speed wasn't too slow. Now, I imagine running these things on the CPU you would be measuring seconds per frame. Basically unusable.

[murraytony]

I wonder as to its value now

Two things come to mind (and I'm probably missing others)
1. it is useful for a reference for tests, you can always run lavapipe as a comparison even if you only have one GPU.
2. The code can be used as a software fallback in some cases mixing software and gpu rendering

[QwertyChouskie]

Mesa has always had a software implementation of OpenGL and now Vulkan, but I wonder as to its value now vs. Mesa's early days. Initially, Mesa software rendering was good because graphics card drivers on Linux were poor or nonexistent, and rendering speed wasn't too slow. Now, I imagine running these things on the CPU you would be measuring seconds per frame. Basically unusable.

It's good for testing (e.g. CI testing without needing a GPU in your CI server), and as a fallback in situations where slow rendering is better than no rendering (also remember that Mesa isn't only used on Linux).