Google Begins Upstreaming Fuchsia OS Support Into Mesa 3D

With not hearing much about Fuchsia OS in a while and the Fuchsia OS team being hit hard by layoffs last year, coming as a surprise today is seeing Google beginning to upstream Fuchsia OS support into the Mesa 3D graphics driver stack.

Google engineers have begun upstreaming "simple support" into Mesa for getting basic bits of Mesa building on Fuchsia OS with its Zircon kernel. This "fairly standard support" so far is around Mesa's utility code. Google engineer C Stout authored the code while Gurchetan Singh, also of Google, took to shepherding this code into upstream Mesa.

While this could open up the door to the open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers being used on Fuchsia OS, that would be contingent still on having the necessary kernel driver support too and the compatible winsys and other related code still needed. What Google is initially using Mesa for with Fuchsia OS appears to be around the Lavapipe software/CPU-based Vulkan implementation and gfxstream-vk as the Graphics Streaming Kit for serializing and forwarding graphics API calls. (Via this aging merge request from four months ago is their draft gfxstream code for Mesa albeit not yet upstream and remains to be seen if that code will make it in with its current form.)

This very simple and early Fuchsia OS support landed today via this Mesa merge request.