Mesa News Archives

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.

The High Precision Event Timer (HPET) has long been a source of issues for Linux developers and it turns out systems relying on HPET rather than the CPU's TSC have in recent months suffered significant performance degradation with the Mesa OpenGL driver code.

Mesa's Rusticl OpenGL implementation written in Rust it turns out can already run the Tinygrad open-source software with its OpenCL back-end for running the LLaMA model.

Mesa 23.2 feature development is now over with the code having been branched and the first release candidate tagged for what will be this quarter's stable release series.

Red Hat's Karol Herbst who has done a remarkable job on Rusticl as a modern OpenCL implementation written in Rust for Mesa Gallium3D drivers has another achievement under his belt: OpenCL subgroups are now in place for Mesa.

We've known since last year when Imagination published their open-source PowerVR Vulkan driver that they'd be focusing on a Vulkan hardware driver only and using the likes of the Zink compatibility layer for OpenGL support. Today Imagination formally announced OpenGL 4.6 for their GPUs via Zink.

Thanks to Joshua Ashton of Valve's Linux team, the Mesa RADV driver has added support for the VK_EXT_pipeline_robustness Vulkan extension as an efficiency win and will be beneficial for Steam Play gaming.

Lavapipe as the software-based Vulkan implementation within Mesa has now landed support for Vulkan descriptor extensions and in turn this CPU-based Vulkan implementation can begin running some Direct3D 12 games with VKD3D-Proton. Keep in mind, however, the performance is severely limited.

Mesa's Rust-written OpenCL implementation Rusticl for Gallium3D drivers has now added experimental FP16 to its feature set.

Earlier this month I ran some fresh benchmarks of Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan against RadeonSI. While Zink in general is already quite speedy and in good shape for most workloads, those tests uncovered some troubled spots and Zink lead developer Mike Blumenkrantz of Valve has been diving into some of those issues with fixes. Another merge request is pending to deal with inefficiencies in the Mesa Vulkan windowing system integration (WSI) code.

Mesa has switched from SHA1 to BLAKE3 for its shader hashing to deliver better performance.

The "Terakan" Vulkan driver continues to be developed as an open-source Vulkan API implementation catering to the aging Radeon HD 6000 series graphics processors.

In going through my recent RADV-Zink vs. RadeonSI OpenGL benchmarks, Valve's Mike Blumenkrantz has already been landing optimizations/fixes and there is another one on the way as a result.

Thanks to the driver being open-source, the ATI (AMD) R300 Gallium3D driver within Mesa is still seeing new (occasional) optimizations for Radeon graphics cards launched nearly two decades ago.

The convenient Mesa Matrix tracker that has long shown Vulkan and OpenGL versions and extensions supported by the different open-source drivers has also now begun reporting OpenCL support.

Following my recent RADV+Zink vs. RadeonSI OpenGL benchmarking for various games and workloads, Valve's Zink lead developer Mike Blumenkrantz was hopping on some of the benchmarks where this generic OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation lagged behind the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver.

VMware's SVGA Gallium3D driver that provides OpenGL support within guest virtual machines running with VMware virtualization products is now finally defaulting to using the modern NIR intermediate representative rather than Gallium3D's TGSI.

The Mesa Venus driver that provides Vulkan API support for use inside of QEMU with VirtIO-GPU has added a number of extensions to help support for the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver.

Eric Engestrom has delivered another on-time release of a Mesa stable point release. Out today is Mesa 23.1.2 for delivering the latest stable bug fixes for this collection of open-source graphics driver components commonly used on Linux systems.

Overnight another 25 patches were merged to Mesa 23.2 for improving RADV's ray-tracing code after the merge request had been in the works for the past two months.

Following yesterday's news of OpenGL 3.1 and OpenGL ES 3.0 working on the open-source driver for Apple M1/M2 graphics with Asahi Linux using their "edge" channel, those patches to the Asahi AGX Gallium3D driver have now worked their way into the upstream Mesa 23.2 codebase.

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

The ACO "Amd COmpiler" started by Valve for the Mesa RADV Vulkan driver has shown it can do wonders for Linux gaming performance and reducing game load times compared to AMD's official AMDGPU LLVM shader compiler back-end. Recently thanks to the work of Qiang Yu there has been much work hitting upstream Mesa for beginning to enable using the ACO compiler by the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver.

The Freedreno Gallium3D driver within Mesa 23.2-devel is now able to expose OpenGL 4.6 support for Qualcomm's Adreno 600 series graphics processors.

The V3D Gallium3D driver that is most notably used by the latest Raspberry Pi single board computers has landed support in mainline Mesa for native ASTC texture compression support.

For those that prefer waiting to the first point release before shifting to a new Mesa3D quarterly feature release, Mesa 23.1.1 is out today so you can now begin upgrading to this latest set of open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers used on Linux systems and elsewhere.

Mesa 23.1 has been released as this quarter's feature release for this collection of open-source, user-space graphics components that primarily consist of OpenGL and Vulkan drivers.

Mesa 23.1 will likely be released in the next week or two while out today is Mesa 23.1-RC4 to facilitate more last minute testing by Linux gamers and other stakeholders for this set of open-source OpenGL / Vulkan / video acceleration drivers.

VK_KHR_present_wait is an extension originally started by Keith Packard working for Valve on improving the Linux graphics stack. The VK_KHR_present_wait extension allows for waiting for present operations to complete and can be used for monitoring/pacing the application by managing the number of images not yet presented. This Vulkan extension had been supported by Mesa Vulkan drivers under X.Org and now is being enabled for Wayland environments too.

Introduced one month ago in Vulkan 1.3.246 was the new VK_EXT_shader_object extension that was worked on by developers from Activision to Valve. Zink lead developer Mike Blumenkrantz at Valve has been busy the past few weeks on getting this shader object support wired up for use by this OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver.

The newest feature added by Red Hat engineer Karol Herbst to the Rusticl Mesa OpenCL open-source driver is FP64 support.