Mesa 22.1 Open-Source Vulkan Drivers Prepare Support For New Extensions

Ahead of the upcoming Mesa 22.1 feature freeze, the Mesa Vulkan drivers both big and small have been preparing merge requests for wiring up a number of recently introduced Vulkan extensions.

There has been many patches landing this week in Mesa 22.1-devel for enabling new extensions not only for the prominent RADV and Intel ANV Vulkan drivers but also the smaller drivers like V3DV, PanVK, and Lavapipe. Some of the work to have been merged includes:

- RADV now supports VK_KHR_pipeline_library for that recently introduced prominent extension. RADV had already supported the extension when enabling ray-tracing support while now it's unconditionally enabled as long as the ACO back-end is being used.

- Lavapipe and Intel ANV now support VK_EXT_image_2d_view_of_3d. This is the extended introduced yesterday in Vulkan 1.3.211 for helping OpenGL on Vulkan implementations. The Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation meanwhile landed its patches for using this new extension.

- Lavapipe, Turnip, V3DV, ANV, and PanVK now support VK_EXT_debug_utils. PanVK also adds VK_EXT_debug_report support. VK_EXT_debug_utils is used for obtaining more error information for developer usage.

- Turnip added support for VK_KHR_maintenance4.

- Venus added support for VK_EXT_conditional_rendering and VK_EXT_index_type_uint8 extensions.

Not bad for all of this work landing in the past day alongside other patches improving the Vulkan drivers, NIR, and Zink. Mesa 22.1 is tentatively planned for branching next week with its first release candidate and then to ideally have Mesa 22.1 by mid-May.