Merged yesterday for Mesa 21.3 was open-source Vulkan ray-tracing for AMD RDNA2 / RX 6000 series GPUs with the RADV driver. Opened today now is a merge request that would provide Vulkan ray-tracing with RADV to pre-RDNA2 GPUs on this driver going back to the likes of Polaris, granted the performance is another story.

Mesa point releases generally come every two weeks but for the past month have fallen off the wagon. Mesa 21.2.1 came in mid-August and on Tuesday was finally succeeded by Mesa 21.2.2 as a "late and very large" update.

Landing overnight into Mesa 21.3 was experimentally enabling the Vulkan ray-tracing extensions within the open-source Radeon "RADV" driver.

Longtime Mesa developer Karol Herbst who has worked extensively on the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver as well as the OpenCL/compute stack while being employed by Red Hat is now toying with the idea of Rust code inside Mesa.

Not only is Intel progressing with its open-source ray-tracing driver support but the Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has been rounding out its RT code too and now has multiple games correctly rendering.

The latest work landing for Mesa 21.3 is supporting FP16 within the LLVM-based software driver code namely for the LLVMpipe Gallium3D OpenGL and Lavapipe Vulkan drivers.

It's been known that Google has been using the open-source "MSM" DRM/KMS driver on Qualcomm-powered devices that originally started out as a reverse-engineered driver project separate from the company. Now it's also been confirmed how Google is successfully using the open-source Mesa Freedreno OpenGL and TURNIP Vulkan drivers on Qualcomm-powered Chromebooks too.

While Microsoft has long had WGL as an API analogous to EGL for residing between OpenGL and the Windows interfaces, Microsoft has now wired up an EGL implementation for Mesa that works on Windows.

Mesa 21.3 today landed a debug option that can help with the XWayland-based gaming performance around latency and for power management as well.

After last month landing the Zink sub-allocator code for improved performance and also enabling OpenGL ES 3.2 support for Zink, lead developer Mike Blumenkrantz at Valve has been spending time this month working to get more games running on this OpenGL-over-Vulkan Mesa driver.

Mike Blumenkrantz in addition to addressing that big performance problem with Tesseract and other Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan improvements in recent days has now landed OpenGL ES 3.2 support.

Going from ~11 FPS to ~602 FPS for an open-source game marks the latest work on Zink for OpenGL atop Vulkan within Mesa.

For those that prefer to hold off on upgrading to a new Mesa stable release series until the first point release is out, Mesa 21.2.1 is now available as the first update to this quarter's Mesa 21.2 series.

Mesa's Zink Gallium3D code for implementing OpenGL-over-Vulkan can now run a heck of a lot faster with the newest Mesa 21.3 code.

The change led by AMD engineers for adding AV1 VA-API acceleration support to the Gallium3D "VA" state tracker front-end has landed in Mesa 21.3.

The LLVMpipe driver providing a generic OpenGL implementation that's CPU-accelerated for Mesa - and more performant than alternatives thanks to LLVM - can now support OpenGL 4.5 compatibility profile contexts.

Several improvements were merged on Friday to Mesa's Gallium3D Nine state tracker that allows for an alternative means of Direct3D 9 support within Wine.

Mesa 21.2 is out as the latest quarterly update to this open-source Linux graphics driver stack for user-space, most notably providing the Intel and Radeon OpenGL/Vulkan drivers among others.

Years ago particularly when the open-source Linux GPU drivers were in their infancy it was known in some cases having to fake/spoof the GPU driver name or model in order to workaround artificial bugs / problematic code paths targeted to a particular OpenGL driver or even to achieve greater performance. With a new Mesa merge request called "Unleash the dragon!", this is still very much a problem in 2021 even now in the Android space.

Valve contractor Mike Blumenkrantz is known for his work on the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation but recently has also been engaged in some of the Lavapipe software Vulkan driver work and related to that is the venerable LLVMpipe OpenGL Gallium3D driver. Needless to say, there's some interesting work happening.

The Mesa release train continues at full speed ahead for these open-source Linux graphics driver components.

Mesa 21.2 continues stabilizing for a planned release in August while released overnight was Mesa 21.2-rc2 as the newest weekly release candidate.

The LLVMpipe software OpenGL driver in Gallium3D as well as the Lavapipe Vulkan software implementation now have anisotropic texture filtering support with Mesa 21.3 development code.

Mesa 21.2 feature development is now over and the first release candidate issued for this next quarterly feature release to these open-source OpenGL/Vulkan Linux drivers.

Mesa's open-source Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has landed support for Next-Gen Geometry (NGG) culling support as ultimately what should provide another performance win for some workloads.

For going along with the newly added support in the MSM DRM kernel driver, Mesa's Freedreno Gallium3D OpenGL and Turnip Vulkan drivers have landed support for the Adreno 660 and Adreno 635 graphics processors.

Mesa's V3DV Vulkan driver for newer Broadcom VideoCore graphics IP that is most notably used by the newer Raspberry Pi single board computers now has support for geometry shaders as its latest feature.

The latest achievement for Mesa's generic OpenGL implementation atop Vulkan is being able to handle OpenGL ES 3.2.

Earlier this year was the proposed NVIDIA code from NVIDIA for allowing Mesa's GBM to support alternative back-ends. This support is notable given that most Wayland compositors are catering to using Mesa's Generic Buffer Manager (GBM) rather than EGLStreams or other options for buffer management. That support code has now been merged into Mesa 21.2.

With the half-way point for the year upon us, here is a look back at the most exciting Mesa open-source graphics driver news so far in 2021 with exciting contributions from Microsoft, AMD and Intel continuing to be the most open-source friendly graphics vendors, Zink making remarkable progress for OpenGL over Vulkan, performance optimizations galore, more embedded Vulkan drivers coming about, and other milestones for open-source Linux graphics.