With the first Mesa release of 2021 for open source Linux GPU drivers upcoming with Mesa 20.1 hitting the Release Candidate stage, Collabora have been busy bringing up OpenGL on ARM Mali GPUs.

This is coming with the Panfrost driver, which Collabora has been working on for some time now. While not officially conformant yet as it seems they haven't gone through the conformance testing from The Khorons Group, they announced in a fresh blog post that both the Midgard and Bifrost GPU generation will see "non-conformant OpenGL ES 3.0 on Bifrost and desktop OpenGL 3.1 on Midgard (Mali T760 and newer) and Bifrost".

Great news for open source drivers, as having expanded proper native OpenGL support means more devices with these Mali GPUs will be able to run increasingly advanced games and applications out of the box with Mesa drivers and a modern Linux distribution.

You'll find these GPUs in various chips from the likes of AmLogic, Rockchip, Exynos, Allwinner and more.

See the full blog post here .

Going by the current roadmap for Mesa, we're expecting to see the final release of Mesa 20.1 with all the latest in open source graphics drivers for Linux in early February.

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.

Despite the small version bump, Godot 3.2.4 will be quite big release for game developers wanting to squeeze out some more performance.

The first Beta release is out now , and the Godot team mentioned it's best to get in and start testing now to ensure your games and Godot as a whole is as good as can be when Godot 3.2.4 is released properly. With 3.2.3 now behind them which added in batching for GLES2, they're moving to ensure it's hooked up for GLES3 too.

Apart from the usual assortment of fixes, these are the major changes:

• Android App Bundle and subview embedding support.
• 2D batching for GLES3 (remember that we added it for GLES2 in 3.2.2), and improvements to GLES2's batching.
• A new software skinning for MeshInstance to replace the slow GPU skinning on devices that don't support the fast GPU skinning (especially mobile).

If you're not a game developer, this is probably like speaking another language. Originally, Godot was drawing up various parts of the graphics you see on an individual basis, meaning that each rectangle, polygon, line and so on added to the OpenGL overhead. To better take advantage of a GPUs power, batching pulls a load of it together to save on that performance. Want to know a bit more detail? You can see one of their original blog posts about it here .

While Godot 4.0 will bring with it Vulkan support, a lot of developers stick with the current version of a game engine for a long time, as moving and upgrading can cause all sorts of issues. So giving developers the most performance they can get in the current Godot is great. Godot 4.0 is also still quite some time away so it makes sense.

Collabora have written up a post about their recent work on the Panfrost driver, a free and open source driver for powering modern Mali GPUs found in many devices.

It's been advancing quickly, with it now supporting all the major features of OpenGL ES 2.0. They mentioned some work has even got into supporting some features of the proper desktop OpenGL 2.1 as well. Thanks to the work done, the Panfrost driver with a Mali G31 chip can now run Wayland compositors with GNOME 3 and it can even do a little gaming along with hardware-accelerated video in some players.

Own a device with a Bifrost generation Mali GPU? All the work that's gone into the Panfrost driver is included already in upstream Mesa but you need to set the "PAN_MESA_DEBUG=bifrost" environment variable for Bifrost currently.

Nice to see Collabora continue advancing Linux graphics across more devices. See their full blog post here , where they go into more technical detail about the work that went into this.

A very interesting use of open source in action here from the incredibly smart team over at Collabora who teamed up with Microsoft engineers to get OpenGL and OpenCL via DirectX.

Why is this interesting? Well, they're doing it buy using the open source Mesa drivers. It's incredibly clever, and shows just how far translation layers are being used industry-wide. Once this is all implemented, it means that any device that supports DirectX 12 would also work with (and actually be compliant) with OpenGL 3.3 and OpenCL 1.2.

Not all Windows-powered devices have consistent support for hardware-accelerated OpenCL and OpenGL. So in order to improve application compatibility, we are building a generic solution to the problem. This means that a GPU vendor only has to implement a D3D12 driver for their hardware in order to support all three APIs.

This mapping layer is also expected to serve as a starting point in porting older OpenCL and OpenGL applications over to D3D12.

In addition, we believe this is good for the wider open source community. A lot of the problems we are solving here are shared with other drivers and translation layers, and we hope that the code will be useful beyond the use cases listed above.

Collabora

It's not finished yet, plenty of work is still to be done but you can find the source code online now and they are planning to upstream the work to the main Mesa project.

Speaking to Collabora today over email to get something cleared up, I asked them if this actually meant that if a developer made an OpenGL game, that on Windows they could keep it as OpenGL but it would run through DirectX 12 in the driver without the developer needing to do anything. Daniel Stone, Graphics Lead at Collabora, replied to say "Provided the application uses a supported version of the OpenGL API, it will be able to run unmodified using the OS's DirectX 12 driver. This applies to any application, not just games! :)".

What's interesting here then, is not how this directly benefits Linux/Linux Gaming but cross-platform compatibility as a whole which is great. Especially good when it's using open source already, so improvements can go back into upstream Mesa, therefore making Linux drivers even better in future.

I'm keen for anything open source like this that can help developers, good stuff.

See the full blog post on the Collabora website .