NVK Merge Request Opened For Landing Open-Source NVIDIA Vulkan Driver In Mesa

NVK as the open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver being developed for Mesa has to this point been developed out-of-tree as it's been in its early stages, depends upon Nouveau DRM kernel driver improvements, and ultimately isn't too useful until the Nouveau GSP/re-clocking situation is sorted out upstream. But overnight the merge request was opened to introduce NVK to mainline Mesa.

NVK isn't worked on by NVIDIA but has been worked on by developers from Collabora, Red Hat, and the open-source community. Faith Ekstrand opened the merge request that could see NVK potentially merged soon for Mesa 23.3-devel.

Ekstrand sums up the current feature state for NVK as:

"I won't claim parity with RADV but we've got a pretty solid set at this point. My GSoC student (@mohamexiety) is most of the way through YCbCr and, once that's done, we'll be able to claim Vulkan 1.2 with reasonable confidence. We've also got a decent set of features on top of that. Not everything required for DXVK, VKD3D, and Zink, but we've got most of it. What remains is either annoying (lines) or is compiler heavy enough that I'd rather just get the new back-end compiler up and going than try to fix all the codegen bugs."

This NVK driver does depend upon the new Nouveau kernel API that isn't yet merged but is "just about ready" for upstream. The hope then is to merge NVK into Mesa as soon as those kernel patches are upstreamed. It will be interesting to see if this can come together in the Linux 6.6 timeframe.

More details for those interested in this merge request.