Even Though It's Currently Slow, The Mesa NVIDIA "NVK" Vulkan Driver Has Been Making Good Progress

During XDC 2023 this week in Spain, Faith Ekstrand with Collabora provided a status update on the NVK Vulkan driver that continues to be developed inside Mesa for providing open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver support.

As previously covered on Phoronix, Linux 6.6 adds the new user-space API for NVK with the Nouveau DRM kernel driver. The initial NVK Vulkan driver code in turn was merged for Mesa 23.3 that will debut later this quarter. Ahead of the upcoming Mesa 23.3 feature freeze, Ekstrand and others have been in a mad dash to land some remaining Vulkan extensions and other enhancements to this open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver.

Ekstrand's talk also covered the ongoing work around the NVIDIA GSP firmware adoption by the Nouveau kernel driver, which remains an ongoing process but one that is important for improving the GeForce RTX 2000 series and newer support under Linux. This GSP support with power management handling is also important for working toward improving the performance of this open-source NVIDIA Linux driver.

In case you missed it from the end of summer, see my initial NVK Vulkan driver benchmarks for an idea of the performance compared to the NVIDIA proprietary driver.

Ekstrand also held a second talk focused on NAK, the in-progress and Rust-written shader compiler. This NVIDIA NAK Rust shader compiler will ultimately be important too for bettering the open-source NVIDIA Mesa graphics performance.

Those wishing to learn more can see the slide deck for the NVK status update. There is also these slides dedicated to NAK with the work on writing compilers in Rust for Mesa. The video presentation from XDC 2023 is embedded below.