Mesa 21.0 Merges Direct3D 12 Gallium3D Driver

Mesa 21.0 will allow running OpenCL and OpenGL on top of Gallium3D for any hardware on Windows 10 supporting Direct3D 12 acceleration.

The Microsoft-backed Direct3D 12 Gallium3D driver has been merged this morning into the recently open Mesa 21.0-devel feature window. This Gallium3D driver isn't about running Direct3D 12 on Linux but rather about running other graphics/compute APIs on top of Direct3D 12 with Windows 10.

Microsoft and their partners at Collabora and other stakeholders have been working for months on this translation layer for allowing OpenGL/OpenCL to run atop D3D12 drivers. As part of this driver is also a path for going from the NIR intermediate representation to DXIL for consumption by the Windows Direct3D hardware drivers.

Following today's initial commit there still is more code expected to land soon, including the OpenCL C compiler API for use on Microsoft's implementation.

So as of today the initial D3D12 Gallium3D code is merged and will be part of Mesa 21.0's debut in Q1.

Microsoft has been heavily involved in Mesa in recent months as part of their effort for exposing GPU acceleration to Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL2) and allowing GL/CL acceleration in cases where there is only D3D12 hardware driver support.

Interesting times at Microsoft as we roll into 2021!