Mesa Open-Source 3D Drivers Experienced Record Growth In 2022

Valve developers investing heavily into the open-source 3D graphics driver stack, AMD continuing their big contributions to Mesa, the Apple AGX Gallium3D driver taking shape, Microsoft continuing to leverage Mesa for various purposes on Windows, Zink maturing for OpenGL atop Vulkan, and other efforts all culminated with the most ever code growth to Mesa in a single year as well as nearly the most ever commits to this 3D graphics driver project.

The GitStats for Mesa show that 2022 was a phenomenal year on the Mesa scene for these predominantly Vulkan and OpenGL open-source drivers used on Linux and other platforms. It was a busy year with all that was going on from Intel's Arc Graphics DG2/Alchemist enablement, AMD RDNA3 support, a ton of Linux driver fixes for gaming thanks to Valve, many new Vulkan extensions being introduced, and a whole lot more as covered in hundreds of Phoronix articles over the course of the year.

As of this morning the Mesa Git repository is up to 164,638 commits from around 1,306 different authors. There is around 4,507,217 lines in the Mesa Git repository both of code, documentation, tests, etc.

On a commit basis, Mesa nearly tied with last year for the most commits ever... As of right now with just two days to go in the year, Mesa is at 14,830 commits compared to 2021's all-time high of 15,026 commits. This year is slightly ahead of 2020's great year of 14,729 commits. But where Mesa did experience record growth this year was on new lines of code added. Last year saw Mesa having 1,125,814 new lines added and 943,405 lines removed, or a net gain of 182k lines. But this year Mesa saw 1,382,754 new lines and 665,472 lines removed, or a net gain of 717k lines! A much greater net gain than last year or any prior year for Mesa3D development.

The most prolific Mesa developers of all time remain Brain Paul (Mesa3D founder, currently at VMware), Marek Olsak (AMD), Emma Anholt (formerly Intel and Broadcom, now Google), Jason Ekstrand (formerly Intel, now Collabora), and Ken Graunke (Intel).

This year the most prolific contributor to the Mesa code-base on a commit basis was Mike Blumenkrantz with 10.3% (1,538 commits) to Mesa. Blumenkrantz is working for Valve with a focus on the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation. This is the second year in a row that Blumenkrantz has been the number one contributor to Mesa.

Following Blumenkrantz with the most commits were Alyssa Rosenzweig (Collabora / Panfrost / Apple AGX), Samuel Pitoiset (Valve / primarily RADV), Marek Olšák (AMD), Jason Ekstrand (Collabora), and Emma Anholt (Google).

There were around 299 different authors to Mesa3D this year -- a record number of distinct email addresses contributor to Mesa. In comparison last year saw around 264 authors and the year prior 246.

The Mesa Git tree is closing out 2022 at 4.5 million lines contained... If 2023 is anything like this year, it could surpass 5 million lines within the Git tree next year. With NVK for open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver on the horizon, Vulkan Video extensions in development for ANV and RADV, Apple Vulkan driver efforts underway, next-gen hardware from AMD and Intel coming in the next year, and Valve and Microsoft showing no signs of letting up with their Mesa contributors, 2023 should be another exciting year for Mesa.