Eric Engestrom has published Mesa 24.1-rc2 as the latest weekly release candidate of Mesa 24.1 as we work toward the stable release likely in the next week or two.
Mesa News Archives
2,402 Mesa open-source and Linux related news articles on Phoronix since 2006.
Given a two year old bug against Mesa around slow initialization/start-up time for GTK4 on Intel graphics, prolific Zink developer Mike Blumenkrantz recently took to optimizing Zink's start-up time for this generic OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver implementation.
In addition to many RadeonSI driver optimizations that were merged just prior to yesterday's code branching and Mesa 24.1-rc1 release, a number of Etnaviv driver improvements were also merged for benefiting that recent Vivante NPU IP open-source driver work.
Shortly following today's Mesa 24.1 code branching, the first release candidate has been announced by ongoing Mesa release manager Eric Engestrom.
At the start of April Mesa 24.1 saw Vulkan explicit sync support for Wayland implemented. Now hitting Mesa 24.1-devel today is Vulkan explicit sync support for X11/X.Org.
Mike Blumenkrantz with Valve's open-source Linux graphics driver team has merged a big optimization / bug fixing effort he's recently been tackling for the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver.
Mesa's Lavapipe driver as a software (CPU-based) implementation of the Vulkan API has now implemented support for ray-tracing pipelines.
It's been a long journey but Valve's Samuel Pitoiset has now enabled VK_EXT_shader_object support by default with Mesa's Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" for the upcoming Mesa 24.1 release.
Samuel Pitoiset of Valve's open-source Linux graphics driver team has landed support in the RADV Vulkan driver for the Vulkan VK_EXT_device_address_binding_report extension with Mesa 24.1.
Mesa 24.1's Vulkan windowing system integration (WSI) code now has support for the Wayland linux-drm-syncobj-v1 protocol for explicit synchronization support.
Lead Asahi AGX Gallium3D driver developer Alyssa Rosenzweig has carried out a big sync to upstream Mesa 24.1 for this open-source Apple Silicon OpenGL graphics driver.
Due to some games checking the graphics card's vendor ID and matching to NVIDIA then just assuming it's NVIDIA's official (proprietary) driver in use, the Mesa NVK Vulkan driver has added a workaround to allow concealing the vendor ID in order to bypass NVIDIA-specific checks such as for the driver version in use.
Merged this week into Mesa 24.1 for the Broadcom VideoCore V3DV Vulkan driver that is most notably used by the latest Raspberry Pi boards is support for VK_KHR_dynamic_rendering.
It has taken many years but the Mesa 3D open-source graphics drivers have proven very successful from the open-source AMD Vulkan and OpenGL drivers proving they can be capable of competing with the closed-source drivers not only for gaming but also workstation tasks, the Windows vs. Linux graphics driver performance gap largely closed, Microsoft even leveraging Mesa for their translations to the D3D12 API, vendors like Imagination developing once unthinkable open-source drivers, etc. But with the increasing importance to corporations, so has the responsibilities and concerns of Mesa driver developers.
Eric Engestrom has released Mesa 24.0.3 as the newest bi-weekly bug-fix release to the current Mesa 24.0 stable series graphics drivers.
Valve contractor Mike Blumenkrantz has been known for many great Mesa improvements the past several years, especially around Zink for the OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation within Mesa. Over the past four years he has taken on many great performance optimizations and other significant code undertakings to improve Mesa. Blumenkrantz has picked his latest battle and appears to be around Mesa's Direct Rendering Infrastructure (DRI) interfaces.
Thanks to the nature of open-source and AMD making their Radeon Memory Visualizer "RMV" open-source under the GPUOpen umbrella, outside of AMD graphics drivers it's found usage elsewhere. Back in January I wrote how Intel's open-source Vulkan driver was adapted for being able to interface with the Radeon Memory Visualizer. Now this week the Qualcomm Adreno "TURNIP" Vulkan driver has also been wired up for enabling RMV integration.
While Mesa Gallium3D drivers with capable GPUs have already supported accelerated AV1 video deocding, to date it's been limited to the Video Acceleration API (VA-API). With newly-merged code for Mesa 24.1, the VDPAU state tracker can now also handle AV1 decoding with supported drivers/GPUs.
The performance is likely to be atrocious, but the Mesa Lavapipe driver implementing the Vulkan API for CPU-based execution has rolled out support for Vulkan ray-tracing.
Recently there has been out-of-tree successes on adapting Mesa to work on Microsoft's Universal Windows Platform (UWP). UWP is also used by the Microsoft Xbox Series X/S game consoles and in turn paired with the Microsoft D3D12 driver work within Mesa for allowing OpenGL and other APIs atop D3D12, is allowing new games/software to be ported to the Xbox.
Should you be running nine or more GPUs per system, the Mesa 24.1 release next quarter will raise the limit of 8 DRM devices for the Vulkan API per system to now allow a theoretical 256 GPUs per system.
It looks like the new Panthor DRM driver will be submitted for the upcoming Linux 6.9 kernel now that it made it into drm-misc-next today. In turn the Mesa 24.1-devel code has landed support for this newer Arm Mali graphics into the Panfrost Gallium3D driver.
Valve contractor Mike Blumenkrantz is back at it working on some exciting improvements to Mesa and in particular for the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation.
Mesa 24.0 series release manager Eric Engestrom is out with another on-time bi-weekly point release for this set of open-source GPU user-space driver components. There are many fixes, new Intel ADL-N PCI IDs, and other backported updates for this latest stable release.
With the Mesa 24.1-devel Git code as of this morning, the Radeon RADV Vulkan driver is now exposing the VK_KHR_video_decode_av1 for Vulkan Video accelerated decoding of AV1 video content.
Longtime AMD open-source Mesa developer Marek Olšák after more than one decade working officially for AMD and years before that as an independent open-source contributor going back to the R300g days still has not run out of new performance optimizations to pursue. The most recent accomplishment for this leading Mesa contributor are some refinements to the OpenGL threading "glthread" code for lowering the memory footprint.
When it comes to neural processing unit NPU/AI accelerators for Linux there is open-source options with the likes most notably of Intel-owned Habana Labs leading the way, Intel's iVPU driver for the NPU found within Meteor Lake SoCs, AMD recently posting a Ryzen AI Linux driver, etc. When it comes to reverse-engineered efforts, the Etnaviv project has expanded its scopes from just Vivante graphics IP to also embracing the Vivante NPU IP for running workloads like TensorFlow Lite. With the latest open-source achievements, the Etnaviv NPU performance is coming incredibly close to the proprietary and official driver.
The open-source NVIDIA "NVK" Vulkan driver within Mesa 24.1-devel has seen improvements made for systems capable of Resizable BAR "ReBAR" support.
As a follow-up to the news of Mesa looking at enabling Zink by default as part of the drivers to build out-of-the-box, that change has now been merged. Additionally, the D3D12 Mesa driver that sees regular contributions by Microsoft engineers is also now being compiled by default when running on Windows.
With the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver implementation continuing to prove itself robust and as performant as native hardware OpenGL drivers, the Mesa developers continue exploring new opportunities for it. Given its successes, a merge request has been opened so Zink would become part of the default drivers built by Mesa out-of-the-box without needing to manually enable it for compilation.
Mesa 24.1 Git has landed the initial infrastructure for allowing drivers to choose to using Zink instead for OpenGL via this OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation. The motivating factor for this latest Mesa work is for using Zink atop the NVK Vulkan driver for newer NVIDIA GPUs.
For those that prefer to wait for the first Mesa point release in a new series before upgrading, Mesa 24.0.1 was released on Wednesday evening with the first batch of fixes for the feature-packed Mesa 24.0.
Merged for Mesa 24.1 is Teflon for Etnaviv NPU driver support in enabling reverse-engineered, open-source driver support for VeriSilicon NPU IP similar to the long-standing Etnaviv Gallium3D graphics support for Vivante graphics. Tomeu Vizoso who has been leading the work on the Etnaviv NPU support has managed to achieve another performance victory and taking the open-source driver performance closer to the proprietary driver.
Valve contractor Friedrich Vock who is part of the team working on the open-source Linux graphics drivers has merged another RADV ray-tracing optimization for this open-source AMD Vulkan driver with this improvement in next quarter's Mesa 24.1 release.
Cassia is an in-development effort for running Microsoft Windows desktop games on Android. This work-in-progress effort is essentially akin to the Steam Play approach but targeted for Android users by leveraging Wine, DXVK, VKD3D-Proton, and then FEX for emulating x86_64 binaries on AArch64.
Following yesterday's release of VK_KHR_video_decode_av1 in Vulkan 1.3.277 for AV1 video decoding, a Mesa merge request has already been opened for adding the VK_KHR_video_decode_av1 extension to the Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver.
Mesa 24.0 made its very punctual debut today as the Q1'2024 feature update to this set of open-source OpenGL, Vulkan, OpenCL, and video acceleration drivers most notably used by Linux systems. From upstreaming of the Imagination PowerVR Vulkan driver to lots of Intel and AMD Radeon improvements as always, Mesa 24.0 is another great update that benefits most Linux desktop users from basic video acceleration and 3D to the most devoted Intel and AMD Linux gamers.
The NVK driver within Mesa for open-source NVIDIA GPU support for the Vulkan API that works with the Nouveau DRM kernel driver is now capable of advertising Vulkan 1.3 API support.
Eric Engestrom with Igalia continues doing a stellar job maintaining the Mesa 23.3 stable series while also leading the Mesa 24.0 release candidates for that upcoming Q1'2024 stable series.
Teflon has been merged into Mesa 24.1 as a Gallium3D front-end that TensorFlow can load for delegating the execution of operations in a neural network model. Teflon was created initially for the Etnaviv Gallium3D driver for being able to run AI inferencing on Vivante NPUs.
With Mesa's Gallium3D architecture there are different state trackers like for VA-API and OpenGL that in turn run atop the different Gallium3D hardware drivers with an aim for common code re-use and making the most of capabilities for each of the drivers. With Mesa's Vulkan drivers there isn't quite that level of code sharing/re-use given Vulkan's low-level API approach, but now the idea is raised whether the Mesa Vulkan drivers may benefit from a more Gallium3D-like runtime.
Mesa 24.0 is shaping up to be a great release for this quarter's set of open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers for Linux and other platforms. Mesa 24.0-rc2 is out today to facilitate the latest weekly test release.
Longtime AMD Mesa driver developer Marek Olšák has laid out a proposal to integrate the libdrm code within Mesa rather than being maintained as its own separate project.
This week prior to the Mesa 24.0 feature freeze / code branching, a notable merge request landed that had been worked on the past few months by one of Valve's open-source Linux graphics driver developers.
Mesa 24.0 feature development has concluded for this quarterly feature update to this set of open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers most notably for AMD Radeon and Intel graphics on Linux but also an increasing number of smaller drivers, like for Apple Silicon, the NVK / Nouveau drivers, Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan, and more.
Eric Engestrom has released Mesa 23.3.3 as the latest stable update to this set of open-source OpenGL and Vulkan graphics drivers plus being the first update of the new year.
Landing in Mesa 24.0-devel this week alongside other exciting changes is some pending work for enhancing VKD3D-Proton and AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution 3 (FSR 3) support for the RADV Vulkan driver.
A change merged today for Mesa 24.0 is yielding much better Vulkan ray-tracing performance for the Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" across a number of games.
Igalia's Danylo Piliaiev has contributed support to the Freedreno Gallium3D driver in Mesa 24.0 for supporting the Qualcomm Adreno 644 graphics.
Eric Engestrom has issued an on-time bi-weekly point release for the Mesa 3D graphics drivers today principally composed of open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers commonly used by the Linux desktop.
2402 Mesa news articles published on Phoronix.