Building Mesa On POWER Now Presents A Default Set Of OpenGL & Vulkan Drivers

Newly merged patches for Mesa 24.2 slightly enhance the default out-of-the-box build experience for the open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers on POWER/PowerPC platforms.

Rather than having to explicitly pass the set of OpenGL (Gallium3D) and Vulkan drivers to build when using the Meson build system with Mesa on POWER/PowerPC, there is now a default set of drivers enabled -- the same set as when building Mesa on MIPS and RISC-V.

The default set of drivers on PPC and PPC64 are the R300, R600, RadeonSI, Nouveau, Virgl, Swrast, and Zink drivers. That landed via this merge rather than needing to explicitly set any drivers to build.

Separately, this merge set a default set of Vulkan drivers for Mesa builds on POWER. There the default drivers are current AMD (RADV) and Swrast (Lavapipe).

While these Mesa drivers can build on POWER, they aren't necessarily well tested there and there can still be support caveats as it concerns the DRM kernel graphics driver components. As we've seen recently, for example, only with Linux 6.10 are newer AMD Radeon GPUs now working properly on RISC-V for DCN display support. There have also been various other CPU architecture and endianness bugs to come up over time. And then on the Intel Xe driver side they have been improving their CPU architecture compatibility so we may end up seeing Intel discrete GPUs on more architectures in the future.

In any event there is now at least a default set of OpenGL/Vulkan drivers set when building on PPC/PPC64 but your mileage may vary with the different GPU drivers. In any event good news for those rocking out to the Linux desktop on the likes of Raptor Computing's Talos II and Blackbird platforms.