Mesa News Archives

Eric Engestrom has put out another on-time Mesa release candidate for what's culminating with the Mesa 23.3 release in the coming weeks.

With Mesa 24.0 the developers have switched from using Doxygen and Breathe for building documentation comments from source to instead use the newer but less heard of Hawkmoth.

With the newly-started Mesa 24.0 development cycle a very exciting feature landed today... The ACO compiler integration for the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver has appeared to effectively wrap up for optionally making use of this Valve-developed shader compiler as an alternative to the AMDGPU LLVM shader back-end.

Shortly after today's Mesa 23.3 branching and opening Mesa 24.0-devel on Git main, Mesa 23.3-rc1 is now formally available as the first weekly release candidate for this quarter's feature series.

Mesa 23.3 has now been branched in Git and in turn that opens up the mainline code to beginning feature work on what will become Mesa 24.0 when it releases in Q1'2024.

The Etnaviv Gallium3D driver within Mesa has long been focused on reverse engineering and supporting Vivante graphics IP found in various SoCs. That driver has worked out well for open-source OpenGL support for Vivante graphics while more recently Etnaviv has begun tackling Vivante neural processing unit (NPU) support that is beginning to be found in various SoCs.

AMD driver engineer Saroj Kumar has contributed Perfetto integration for the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver as the latest means of allowing tracing/profiling for this open-source OpenGL driver.

Karol Herbst at Red Hat who leads development on Mesa's Rust-written OpenCL "Rusticl" driver presented to share the progress made over the course of the year on this modern alternative to Gallium3D's Clover as well as some of the work still being pursued by this open-source OpenCL implementation for Gallium3D drivers.

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.

Merged last week to the X.Org Server is support in the 2D-acceleration-via-OpenGL GLAMOR code for allowing OpenGL ES 3.0 (GLES3) shaders.

Merged to Mesa 23.3 this weekend is initial support in the V3D Gallium3D (OpenGL) and V3DV Vulkan drivers for the Broadcom VideoCore 7.1.x graphics IP that is found within the new Raspberry Pi 5 single board computer.

Merged for this quarter's Mesa 23.3 release is the ability to have the Rusticl Rust-written OpenCL driver running atop Zink, the Gallium3D driver known for OpenGL-on-Vulkan. With Rusticl on Zink this now means getting this OpenCL 3.0 driver working atop Vulkan hardware drivers.

With the much-delayed Mesa 23.2 finally having been released last week, Mesa 23.1.9 is out the door as the last planned maintenance release for that open-source driver series introduced back in Q2.

Adding to the list of notable features coming with Mesa 23.3 later this quarter is enabling delta color compression (DCC) for multi-sample anti-aliasing (MSAA) images on AMD RDNA3 (GFX11) graphics processors.

After being delayed by many weeks, Mesa 23.2 has been released as the quarterly feature release for this collection of open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers used by AMD Radeon, Intel graphics, Apple Silicon, Qualcomm Adreno (Freedreno), Nouveau (open-source NVIDIA), Broadcom / Raspberry Pi, Arm Mali and other hardware.

In addition to Mesa 23.3-devel today seeing Intel Vulkan sparse support finally land, another notable merge request that landed is beginning to plumb in pipeline caching support for the open-source NVIDIA "NVK" Vulkan driver.

The much-delayed Mesa 23.2 will try to make it out this week with Mesa 23.2-rc4 having been issued on Sunday.

Mike Blumenkrantz, who is part of Valve's stellar Linux graphics driver team, has managed another impressive feat of further optimizing the Mesa Vulkan driver code that benefits multiple drivers / hardware vendors.

Mesa 23.1.8 was released on Wednesday as yet another bi-weekly stable release for the Mesa 23.1 release as that series drags on while waiting for Mesa 23.2 to materialize.

Merged for Mesa 23.3 today is the Vulkan windowing system integration (WSI) to allow for the "PresentOptionAsyncMayTear" option that can be used to enable tearing under (X)Wayland if desiring peak performance at the cost of possible imperfect rendering.

The open-source Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has merged support in its ray-tracing (RT) code path for monolithic pipelines.

Mike Blumenkrantz working for Valve's Linux graphics driver team has added implicit sync support to the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver, which in turn now opens this generic driver up for correctly providing GLAMOR rendering with X11 and XWayland environments.

Going along with the MSM DRM driver support for the Qualcomm Adreno 700 series, the open-source TURNIP Vulkan driver this week merged its initial support for the Adreno 700 series.

Mesa 23.2 was supposed to have been released by now following a series of weekly release candidates that started in mid-July when feature work ended. After a five week hiatus, Mesa 23.2-rc3 is now available for testing.

Mesa's Vulkan windowing system integration (WSI) code for Wayland has added the "IMMEDIATE" present mode option that uses Wayland's tearing-control unstable extension to allow for images to be presented immediately but at the risk of visible screen tearing.

The VK_NV_device_generated_commands_compute extension introduced in Vulkan 1.3.258 is now wired up for Mesa's Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver and should further benefit VKD3D-Proton for Steam Play gaming.

Mesa has landed GPUVis integration with a focus on CPU side tracing for help to uncover where games are blocking on the GPU. This GPU Trace Visualizer integration for Mesa was spearheaded by RADV developer Bas Nieuwenhuizen.

While waiting for the belated Mesa 23.2 to eventually surface, the Mesa 23.1 branch remains the latest stable series for this collection of open-source OpenGL/Gallium3D and Vulkan graphics drivers.

Merged for Mesa 23.3 is support for the VirGL code to handle accelerated AV1 video decoding within guest virtual machines.

Another change that has now landed in Mesa 23.3 is enabling support in the TURNIP Vulkan driver for running atop the VirtIO GPU kernel driver in virtualized scenarios.

The NVK open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver has finally been merged into mainline Mesa for easing development of this driver moving forward.

One of the latest feature additions for next quarter's Mesa 23.3 release of these open-source user-space graphics driver components is adding support for the EGL explicit device extension.

Two weeks ago a bug report was opened for Mesa that when using Radeon RX 7900 XT or Radeon Pro WX 9100 graphics, Blender's Eevee shader node trees are unusably slow. A fix has now been merged in reducing that shader compilation time from around 251 seconds to now getting done in just about 9 seconds.

Mesa's LLVMpipe software driver is now exposing system Shared Virtual Memory (SVM) support with the necessary API bits being in place for the modern Rusticl OpenCL driver as well as the older Clover code. Plus with being a CPU-based driver there isn't any added work or complications around shared virtual memory.

First up the belated Mesa 23.1.4 is now available as the latest stable point release in the Mesa 23.1 series.

As part of AMD's interest in improving graphics around Xen virtualization for in-vehicle infotainment systems and other customer uses, AMD engineers have expanded the video acceleration capabilities provided by Mesa's Virgl code.

The High Precision Event Timer (HPET) has long been a source of issues for Linux developers and it turns out systems relying on HPET rather than the CPU's TSC have in recent months suffered significant performance degradation with the Mesa OpenGL driver code.

Mesa's Rusticl OpenGL implementation written in Rust it turns out can already run the Tinygrad open-source software with its OpenCL back-end for running the LLaMA model.

Mesa 23.2 feature development is now over with the code having been branched and the first release candidate tagged for what will be this quarter's stable release series.

Red Hat's Karol Herbst who has done a remarkable job on Rusticl as a modern OpenCL implementation written in Rust for Mesa Gallium3D drivers has another achievement under his belt: OpenCL subgroups are now in place for Mesa.

We've known since last year when Imagination published their open-source PowerVR Vulkan driver that they'd be focusing on a Vulkan hardware driver only and using the likes of the Zink compatibility layer for OpenGL support. Today Imagination formally announced OpenGL 4.6 for their GPUs via Zink.

Thanks to Joshua Ashton of Valve's Linux team, the Mesa RADV driver has added support for the VK_EXT_pipeline_robustness Vulkan extension as an efficiency win and will be beneficial for Steam Play gaming.

Lavapipe as the software-based Vulkan implementation within Mesa has now landed support for Vulkan descriptor extensions and in turn this CPU-based Vulkan implementation can begin running some Direct3D 12 games with VKD3D-Proton. Keep in mind, however, the performance is severely limited.

Mesa's Rust-written OpenCL implementation Rusticl for Gallium3D drivers has now added experimental FP16 to its feature set.

Earlier this month I ran some fresh benchmarks of Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan against RadeonSI. While Zink in general is already quite speedy and in good shape for most workloads, those tests uncovered some troubled spots and Zink lead developer Mike Blumenkrantz of Valve has been diving into some of those issues with fixes. Another merge request is pending to deal with inefficiencies in the Mesa Vulkan windowing system integration (WSI) code.

Mesa has switched from SHA1 to BLAKE3 for its shader hashing to deliver better performance.

The "Terakan" Vulkan driver continues to be developed as an open-source Vulkan API implementation catering to the aging Radeon HD 6000 series graphics processors.

In going through my recent RADV-Zink vs. RadeonSI OpenGL benchmarks, Valve's Mike Blumenkrantz has already been landing optimizations/fixes and there is another one on the way as a result.

Thanks to the driver being open-source, the ATI (AMD) R300 Gallium3D driver within Mesa is still seeing new (occasional) optimizations for Radeon graphics cards launched nearly two decades ago.

The convenient Mesa Matrix tracker that has long shown Vulkan and OpenGL versions and extensions supported by the different open-source drivers has also now begun reporting OpenCL support.