Developer Eric Engestrom has announced the availability of Mesa 21.1, the latest release for Linux open source graphics drivers powering Intel, AMD and more.

In the very short announcement , Engestrom mentioned Mesa will now be back to regular releases with a point release for bug fixes "every other week" which will see Mesa 21.1.1 on May 19. If you want stability, it's usually best to wait for at least that first point release.

As for what's new, as expected there's quite a lot including: RADV (AMD Vulkan driver) Variable Rate Shading, lots of RADV optimizations, Zink (OpenGL over Vulkan) saw a lot of expanded progress to bring it up to scratch and many smaller features and added hardware support.

See more about Mesa on the official site . How soon you get an update will be distribution dependent. Arch pulls it in quite quickly, while the likes of Ubuntu would need a PPA added like the kisak-mesa fresh PPA .

Here's a short and sweet update on the work for Zink, the upcoming OpenGL on top of Vulkan implementation announced by Collabora which has been progressing steadily.

As a quick refresher: Zink is a Mesa Gallium driver that leverages the existing OpenGL implementation in Mesa to provide hardware accelerated OpenGL when only a Vulkan driver is available. More on the why can be found here .

Developer Mike Blumenkrantz has been hacking away at Zink code lately, after announcing back in November 2020 that Valve jumped in to fund more work on it. In a fresh blog post is up where Blumenkrantz mentions the continued sponsorship from Valve, and as a result Zink can now run with NVIDIA GPUs on Linux with the wording "So now zink+nvidia is a thing.". See it in action below:

Once it's ready, it's going to be extremely interesting to see what becomes of it.

Mesa 20.3.0 is the latest and greatest when it comes to Linux open source graphics, bringing with it new hardware support, performance improvements and more. Mesa drivers are what power the likes of Intel and AMD on Linux with the latest Vulkan and OpenGL support whereas NVIDIA have their own proprietary driver.

As always, with it being a brand new release if you're concerned about stability you might want to wait for the first point release with Mesa 20.3.1.

Lots new with this version like the 'V3DV' Vulkan driver for the Raspberry Pi now being available, new extension support, big improvements to the Zink driver (OpenGL implementation on top of Vulkan), new hardware support across both AMD and Intel for the latest chips and some upcoming stuff, the Panfrost driver for Mali GPUs was extended quite a lot too and much more. You can see the release notes here , although they're quite technical and not great reading unless you really know what to look for.

Need to learn more about Mesa drivers? See the official site .

On the Collabora blog, developer Mike Blumenkrantz has given an exciting update to Zink, an open source Mesa Gallium driver for Linux that provides OpenGL on top of Vulkan.

Announced two years ago last month, the point of it is for providing hardware accelerated OpenGL when only a Vulkan driver is available. Not really a situation we're going to see right now but perhaps an important project for some time in the future and perhaps if it can eventually provide better performance - an option to pick later on.

Blumenkrantz mentioned how they've been mentored by hackers at Collabora on their work, and that if a Mesa update shipped now it would come with OpenGL 3.3 support, macOS support and even RaspberryPi 4 support, which curiously why done with the help of Igalia to help test the RPi 4 V3DV Vulkan driver.

Coming up next, Blumenkrantz mentioned numerous areas that will see improvements with hundreds of patching waiting to be upstreamed to add in more advanced features and bring up OpenGL 4 support and then keep going from their advancing it onwards.

Pictured - Unigine Heaven running with Zink with an Intel GPU, credit: Mike Blumenkrantz

Feature support is one thing but what about performance? Looking at Unigine Heaven running with Zink, the driver has come a long way there too. From failing to render textures, to 14FPS (compared with 50FPS on normal OpenGL drivers) up to around 95% of native OpenGL performance which is seriously impressive. Through 2021 Blumenkrantz is hoping to improve that even further.

The latest and greatest in open source graphics drivers has released with Mesa 20.2.0, although you should wait on it if you're after a stable experience.

As always, the Mesa team suggest waiting on at least the first bug fix release with Mesa 20.2.1 which is usually out within a few weeks. Developer Dylan Baker who announced the new release mentioned to expect some more regular releases for the 20.2 series, as they're back from a long vacation.

What's new? Lots, as always. Support for new Vulkan extensions, added support for new GPUs including initial work done for AMD's upcoming RDNA 2 noted as "gfx10.3", expanded GLES 3.2 and OpenGL 4.5 support for LLVMpipe, lots of work on the Panfrost driver for Mali GPUs. You can find some release notes for Mesa 20.2.0 here .

One of the big items this release is for AMD, as the ACO shader compiler announced by Valve has now been switched on as the default for the RADV Vulkan driver although you can still set a debug option to go back to LLVM. This means that you should see smoother gameplay overall with modern AMD GPUs when using Vulkan, and perhaps better overall framerates too. If you want a little more info about ACO, you can see this previous article with the highlights and video from the recent XDC 2020 conference.

Need to learn more about Mesa drivers? See the official site .

Red Hat developer Adam Jackson has opened a new merge request for the Mesa project, with what they're calling GLX Delay, to bring accelerated GLX for Xwayland with the NVIDIA driver.

Their work in progress code should be reasonably fast, they mentioned the OpenGL rendering part should hold up against Xorg itself or EGL "on the bare metal". However, it's thoroughly unfinished with tons not even implemented yet like risizing windows and plenty of other features. Amusingly, they describe the way it's done as something that "sounds unpleasant":

"Delay" is a hack to enable direct GLX contexts under Xwayland when using the NVIDIA binary driver. It works by creating an EGL context on the client side, running GL rendering through that, and translating GLX commands to either EGL or X protocol as necessary. The library that performs this translation is a GLVND vendor library, which Xwayland configures as the vendor responsible for the screen.

Why is it going into Mesa when it's for the NVIDIA proprietary driver? They said pretty simply that Mesa's GLX code already implements most of what's needed to allow it. Additionally, Jackson mentioned how it seems like it will "eliminate a large class of reasons why you might need to use Xorg and NVIDIA's driver" and that it is "better than what you currently get for GLX clients in that scenario, which is llvmpipe". However, it can be seen that it "entrenches the position of NVIDIA's libEGL, since we've only made it more useable" but "on balance, that this reduces the binary driver footprint, and I think that's a good direction to go".

In short: if finished and accepted, you might in future see NVIDIA's proprietary Linux driver + Wayland working nicer.

For those interested, the code is up here .