Just yesterday Raspberry Pi fans were celebrating that the V3DV driver is now officially Vulkan 1.0 conformant for supporting this modern high performance graphics/compute API atop the Raspberry Pi 4 and newer. Today another milestone was reached with V3DV.

Longtime open-source developer Mike Blumenkrantz who has been an Enlightenment developer for many years and was working for Samsung's Open-Source Group prior to its demise jumped into the open-source Linux graphics world this year. While being unemployed he began hacking on the Zink Gallium3D code that allows generic OpenGL acceleration over the Vulkan API. He quickly got the code to the point of OpenGL 4.6 support and quite compelling performance compared to where Zink was at earlier this year. Now it turns out he will continue with his Linux graphics adventures thanks to funding from Valve.

The fallout should be minimal and hopefully not impact any Phoronix readers, but as Mesa rolls into 2021 it is looking to drop support for loading DRI1 graphics drivers.

The second release candidate of Mesa 20.3 is now available for testing ahead of its likely stable debut in early December.

More improvements are coming to Mesa 21.0 following last week's merging of the Direct3D 12 Gallium3D driver that is being used by Microsoft for supporting OpenGL/OpenCL-on-Direct3D 12.

For those trying to setup their Linux systems to be "Big Navi"-ready if purchasing one of the new graphics cards today, some more last minute fixes have landed within Mesa.

It's still short of the full OpenCL 3.0 implementation, but more of the CL 3.0 enablement patches for Gallium3D's "Clover" OpenCL state tracker have now been merged into Mesa 20.1-devel

The newly-opened Mesa 21.0 development window has merged support for EGL_EXT_platform_xcb.

The long-standing patches by Bas Nieuwenhuizen on implementing DMA-BUF modifier support for the RadeonSI code within Mesa has now been merged for next quarter's Mesa 21.0 feature release.

Following the news today of Intel sharing ~60% of their GPU driver code-base between Windows and Linux and working to bring the Intel Graphics Compiler (IGC) to Mesa in 2021, not everyone is enthusiastic about those prospects.

Following the Mesa 20.3 branching on Monday and subsequent opening of Mesa 21.0 for development, the first release candidate of Mesa 20.3 is now available for testing.

Mesa 20.3 was branched this evening in marking the end of feature development for this Q4-2020 Mesa3D release that should debut as stable in December. This also means that Mesa 21.0 is now open for development.

For those sticking to stable releases of Mesa3D there is Mesa 20.2.2 now available as the latest point release.

Zink as the Mesa Gallium3D implementation putting OpenGL 3.x/4.x on top of the Vulkan API is now offering near-native performance.

It's not across the finish line at least yet but Mesa 20.3 just merged today the initial prep changes needed for exposing OpenCL 3.0 support within the Clover Gallium3D state tracker.

Following the news that we were first to report last month on Intel starting open-source public patches for Vulkan ray-tracing in preparation for their forthcoming Xe HPG graphics card, the initial prep work for that Vulkan ray-tracing support has now been merged in time for Mesa 20.3.

With Mesa 20.3 that should be released as stable in December there is working Arm Bifrost graphics support for the open-source Panfrost Gallium3D while looking past that this Arm Mali driver is going to be focusing on better performance and desktop OpenGL 3.1 support.

Beginning with Mesa 20.2 is OpenGL 4.5 support for LLVMpipe, the LLVM-based software rasterizer built as a Gallium3D driver. This succeeded LLVMpipe for years being limited to OpenGL 3.3. While the OpenGL 4.5 support has been enabled for weeks, The Khronos Group has now officially confirmed its implementation.

On top of the AMD Zen L3 cache optimizations hitting Mesa 20.3 today, Marek Olšák has also landed his RadeonSI Gallium3D driver code for optimizing OpenGL uber shaders.

You may recall going back to 2018 that well known open-source AMD Mesa driver developer Marek Olsak was working on Mesa optimizations around the AMD Zen architecture. In particular, better handling of Mesa for Zen's L3 cache design. A rewritten implementation of that has now landed along with some other improvements.

Last week Intel open-source engineers began publishing Linux kernel patches for the "Alder Lake S" graphics support. That work should be found in the Linux 5.11 cycle being christened as stable in early 2021. In user-space, Alder Lake graphics patches also appeared for their OpenCL / oneAPI Level Zero compute stack and now merged into Mesa 20.3 as well for OpenGL / Vulkan support.

Not only is the Zink Gallium3D code for OpenGL accelerated by Vulkan up to around 69% the speed of Intel's OpenGL driver but it's at around a 97% passing test rate for Mesa's Piglit testing.

The interesting work continues pouring in for Mesa 20.3 as the Q4'2020 feature release to this open-source graphics stack... The latest excitement is on the "Clover" front for Gallium3D OpenCL.

Mesa 20.3 has merged a long work-in-progress patch series providing support for going from the modern NIR intermediate representation to TGSI as the conventional Gallium3D IR.

An independent party has slowly begun merging patches into mainline Mesa for allowing the open-source Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" to build on Microsoft Windows.

For weeks there have been patches getting the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation to OpenGL 4.6 while mainline Mesa has been at OpenGL 3.0 support. Thankfully the out-of-tree patch delta is being reduced and this week in Mesa 20.3-devel the code has been upstreamed getting the support level to OpenGL 3.3.

The Zink Gallium3D code for Mesa that is mapping OpenGL on top of the Vulkan API continues making great progress particularly with the near-daily work by developer Mike Blumenkrantz.

Mesa 20.2 officially released at the end of September as the Q3'2020 open-source driver stack update providing open-source OpenGL/OpenCL/Vulkan support for much of the graphics hardware on the market. For those that prefer waiting for the first point release before upgrading, that milestone was reached today.

Good news for Raspberry Pi 4 users... The V3DV Vulkan driver developed over the past year for newer Broadcom VideoCore hardware with an emphasis on the Raspberry Pi 4 support is now mainlined in Mesa 20.3!

Adding to the growing list of Mesa 20.3 features is now RADV ACO supporting NGG GS. Or rather, the Radeon Vulkan driver with the ACO back-end now supports geometry shaders with Next-Gen Geometry (NGG) as found on newer AMD GPUs.