Mesa News Archives

Eric Engestrom with Igalia just released Mesa 23.3 as the much anticipated quarterly update to this set of open-source 3D drivers principally focused on OpenGL and Vulkan API support.

Thanks to prolific RADV driver developer Samuel Pitoiset of Valve's Linux graphics team, mesh/task shader queries have landed for GFX10.3 (RDNA2) with the in-development Mesa 24.0 while support for GFX11 (RDNA3) graphics cards is on the way.

Eric Engestrom on Friday released the fifth weekly release candidate of Mesa 23.3 with this quarterly stable release hopefully debuting in the next week.

Tomeu Vizoso has been leading the effort for supporting Vivante's NPU IP within the Etnaviv driver that began as a reverse-engineered driver for Vivante graphics. The Vivante NPU architecture ends up being close to the graphics cores and Vizoso has been making good progress for enabling the NPUs on this open-source stack. The latest achievement is image classification workloads now running about twice as fast as previously.

The week began with Microsoft taking its Mesa Direct3D 12 code from OpenGL 4.3 to OpenGL 4.4 and then a short time after that reaching OpenGL 4.5. Microsoft now closed out the week by managing to get OpenGL 4.6 implemented atop Direct3D 12.

Mesa 23.3 is gearing up for release in a week or two while out now is Mesa 23.3-rc4 for the latest weekly release candidate to this collection of open-source graphics drivers.

Thanks to prolific Mesa RADV contributor Samuel Pitoiset of Valve's Linux graphics team, a fix is on the way for addressing various issues with Unreal Engine 4 and Unreal Engine 5 games running on Linux.

Hours after writing about Microsoft's Direct3D 12 back-end for Mesa seeing OpenGL 4.4 support, the in-review OpenGL 4.5 code mentioned in that article happened to land in Mesa.

Merged overnight to Mesa 24.0 is the Rust-written NAK compiler back-end for the Nouveau Gallium3D driver and NVK Vulkan driver.

With newly-merged optimizations to Mesa 24.0-devel, the Intel shader compiler back-end is seeing its scheduling code execute around 30% faster. This big speed-up comes due to overhauling how they store pass information and reusing that for multiple pre-RA scheduling modes.

Mesa 23.3-rc3 was released on Wednesday night as the newest weekly release candidate ahead of the Mesa 23.3 release as this quarter's feature series for this collection of OpenGL and Vulkan open-source drivers.

Microsoft engineers continue working on the Mesa drivers as part of their effort for implementing various industry standard APIs atop Direct3D 12. This support can be used in cases of Windows drivers lacking for these APIs as well as being used within WSL for the graphics support while relying on D3D12 with the host environment.

A set of 53 patches were upstreamed on Monday for syncing Mesa 24.0-devel against the latest Asahi AGX Gallium3D driver changes carried by Asahi Linux. This in turn is a big push for getting more of the open-source OpenGL functionality into Mesa for enjoying Linux on Apple M1 and M2 hardware.

Mesa's Rust-based OpenCL implementation "Rusticl" has added initial support for the cl_khr_gl_sharing extension for working on OpenGL and OpenCL interoperability.

Eric Engestrom has put out another on-time Mesa release candidate for what's culminating with the Mesa 23.3 release in the coming weeks.

With Mesa 24.0 the developers have switched from using Doxygen and Breathe for building documentation comments from source to instead use the newer but less heard of Hawkmoth.

With the newly-started Mesa 24.0 development cycle a very exciting feature landed today... The ACO compiler integration for the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver has appeared to effectively wrap up for optionally making use of this Valve-developed shader compiler as an alternative to the AMDGPU LLVM shader back-end.

Shortly after today's Mesa 23.3 branching and opening Mesa 24.0-devel on Git main, Mesa 23.3-rc1 is now formally available as the first weekly release candidate for this quarter's feature series.

Mesa 23.3 has now been branched in Git and in turn that opens up the mainline code to beginning feature work on what will become Mesa 24.0 when it releases in Q1'2024.

The Etnaviv Gallium3D driver within Mesa has long been focused on reverse engineering and supporting Vivante graphics IP found in various SoCs. That driver has worked out well for open-source OpenGL support for Vivante graphics while more recently Etnaviv has begun tackling Vivante neural processing unit (NPU) support that is beginning to be found in various SoCs.

AMD driver engineer Saroj Kumar has contributed Perfetto integration for the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver as the latest means of allowing tracing/profiling for this open-source OpenGL driver.

Karol Herbst at Red Hat who leads development on Mesa's Rust-written OpenCL "Rusticl" driver presented to share the progress made over the course of the year on this modern alternative to Gallium3D's Clover as well as some of the work still being pursued by this open-source OpenCL implementation for Gallium3D drivers.

During XDC 2023 this week in Spain, Faith Ekstrand with Collabora provided a status update on the NVK Vulkan driver that continues to be developed inside Mesa for providing open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver support.

Merged last week to the X.Org Server is support in the 2D-acceleration-via-OpenGL GLAMOR code for allowing OpenGL ES 3.0 (GLES3) shaders.

Merged to Mesa 23.3 this weekend is initial support in the V3D Gallium3D (OpenGL) and V3DV Vulkan drivers for the Broadcom VideoCore 7.1.x graphics IP that is found within the new Raspberry Pi 5 single board computer.

Merged for this quarter's Mesa 23.3 release is the ability to have the Rusticl Rust-written OpenCL driver running atop Zink, the Gallium3D driver known for OpenGL-on-Vulkan. With Rusticl on Zink this now means getting this OpenCL 3.0 driver working atop Vulkan hardware drivers.

With the much-delayed Mesa 23.2 finally having been released last week, Mesa 23.1.9 is out the door as the last planned maintenance release for that open-source driver series introduced back in Q2.

Adding to the list of notable features coming with Mesa 23.3 later this quarter is enabling delta color compression (DCC) for multi-sample anti-aliasing (MSAA) images on AMD RDNA3 (GFX11) graphics processors.

After being delayed by many weeks, Mesa 23.2 has been released as the quarterly feature release for this collection of open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers used by AMD Radeon, Intel graphics, Apple Silicon, Qualcomm Adreno (Freedreno), Nouveau (open-source NVIDIA), Broadcom / Raspberry Pi, Arm Mali and other hardware.

In addition to Mesa 23.3-devel today seeing Intel Vulkan sparse support finally land, another notable merge request that landed is beginning to plumb in pipeline caching support for the open-source NVIDIA "NVK" Vulkan driver.

The much-delayed Mesa 23.2 will try to make it out this week with Mesa 23.2-rc4 having been issued on Sunday.

Mike Blumenkrantz, who is part of Valve's stellar Linux graphics driver team, has managed another impressive feat of further optimizing the Mesa Vulkan driver code that benefits multiple drivers / hardware vendors.

Mesa 23.1.8 was released on Wednesday as yet another bi-weekly stable release for the Mesa 23.1 release as that series drags on while waiting for Mesa 23.2 to materialize.

Merged for Mesa 23.3 today is the Vulkan windowing system integration (WSI) to allow for the "PresentOptionAsyncMayTear" option that can be used to enable tearing under (X)Wayland if desiring peak performance at the cost of possible imperfect rendering.

The open-source Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has merged support in its ray-tracing (RT) code path for monolithic pipelines.

Mike Blumenkrantz working for Valve's Linux graphics driver team has added implicit sync support to the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver, which in turn now opens this generic driver up for correctly providing GLAMOR rendering with X11 and XWayland environments.

Going along with the MSM DRM driver support for the Qualcomm Adreno 700 series, the open-source TURNIP Vulkan driver this week merged its initial support for the Adreno 700 series.

Mesa 23.2 was supposed to have been released by now following a series of weekly release candidates that started in mid-July when feature work ended. After a five week hiatus, Mesa 23.2-rc3 is now available for testing.

Mesa's Vulkan windowing system integration (WSI) code for Wayland has added the "IMMEDIATE" present mode option that uses Wayland's tearing-control unstable extension to allow for images to be presented immediately but at the risk of visible screen tearing.

The VK_NV_device_generated_commands_compute extension introduced in Vulkan 1.3.258 is now wired up for Mesa's Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver and should further benefit VKD3D-Proton for Steam Play gaming.

Mesa has landed GPUVis integration with a focus on CPU side tracing for help to uncover where games are blocking on the GPU. This GPU Trace Visualizer integration for Mesa was spearheaded by RADV developer Bas Nieuwenhuizen.

While waiting for the belated Mesa 23.2 to eventually surface, the Mesa 23.1 branch remains the latest stable series for this collection of open-source OpenGL/Gallium3D and Vulkan graphics drivers.

Merged for Mesa 23.3 is support for the VirGL code to handle accelerated AV1 video decoding within guest virtual machines.

Another change that has now landed in Mesa 23.3 is enabling support in the TURNIP Vulkan driver for running atop the VirtIO GPU kernel driver in virtualized scenarios.

The NVK open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver has finally been merged into mainline Mesa for easing development of this driver moving forward.

One of the latest feature additions for next quarter's Mesa 23.3 release of these open-source user-space graphics driver components is adding support for the EGL explicit device extension.

Two weeks ago a bug report was opened for Mesa that when using Radeon RX 7900 XT or Radeon Pro WX 9100 graphics, Blender's Eevee shader node trees are unusably slow. A fix has now been merged in reducing that shader compilation time from around 251 seconds to now getting done in just about 9 seconds.

Mesa's LLVMpipe software driver is now exposing system Shared Virtual Memory (SVM) support with the necessary API bits being in place for the modern Rusticl OpenCL driver as well as the older Clover code. Plus with being a CPU-based driver there isn't any added work or complications around shared virtual memory.

First up the belated Mesa 23.1.4 is now available as the latest stable point release in the Mesa 23.1 series.

As part of AMD's interest in improving graphics around Xen virtualization for in-vehicle infotainment systems and other customer uses, AMD engineers have expanded the video acceleration capabilities provided by Mesa's Virgl code.