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.

Do you have a Guitar Hero Live (PS3) 6-fret guitar or perhaps one from the Wii U that you want to use on Linux? Prepare to dust them off.

The new hid-ghlive-dkms driver from developer Pascal Giard, was created as they "really wanted to play a 6-fret guitar on Clone Hero". For those not aware, Clone Hero is a free rhythm game (a clone of Guitar Hero - get it?), which can be played with any 5 or 6 button guitar controller, game controllers, or just your standard computer keyboard.

Pictured - Clone Hero on Linux.

Currently this new driver only supports the Wii U and PS3 dongles, with support for the PS4 version being looked into and will hopefully work with it when they figure it out.

Once again another case of why open source is important: preservation. Ensuring that hardware you buy can continue working many years after the original creature moves on. You should be able to use your hardware and accessories wherever you want. Another great project. The developer has mentioned they do intend to get this up-streamed into the Linux Kernel too.

You can find it on GitHub .

NVIDIA just quietly released another fresh update to their special developer-focused Vulkan Beta Driver.

After moving it over to the 455 series at the end of September, they released driver version 455.26.01 on October 9 which is a small bug-fix cleanup with these changes:

• Reduce host memory consumption for descriptor memory when VkDescriptorSetVariableDescriptorCountAllocateInfo is used
• Handle SPIR-V 1.4 non-Input/Ouput entry point variables correctly
• Fixed a blending optimization that sometimes produced an incorrect result
• Fixed SPIR-V intersection shader compilation issue when multi entry point ray tracing modules are used

Reminder: This special Vulkan beta driver is where all the shiny new stuff goes in before making its way into the stable release for everyone. Really, it's mostly aimed at developers and serious enthusiasts. Unless you need what's in them, it's generally best to use the stable drivers.

The newest stable versions of the main NVIDIA driver for Linux are at 450.80.02 released on September 30 from their "long lived" series or 455.28 released on October 7 from their "short lived" series. The difference can be a little confusing, NVIDIA explained the difference between short / long lived drivers as:

Any given release branch is either long-lived or short-lived. The difference is in how long the branch is maintained and how many releases are made from each branch. A short-lived branch typically has only one or two (non-beta) releases, while long-lived branches will have several.
[…]
When we make changes to the driver, we evaluate the oldest branch the change needs to go into. New features go into whatever the latest branch is, while bug fixes go into the older branches and are integrated through the newer branches. So using a short-lived branch doesn’t mean that you miss out on fixes, it just means that you also get the latest features.

Want to keep up with the latest Linux driver updates? You can follow our dedicated Drivers tag , all our tags have an RSS feed you can follow.

NVIDIA have produced a brand new stable Linux driver with version 455.28, which adds in new GPU support and there's plenty of fixes for us too.

This is a proper mainline stable driver, so it should be good for anyone to upgrade with. A lot of this is coming over from previous Beta releases.

With this new 455.28 driver it sees official Linux support for the GeForce RTX 3080, GeForce RTX 3090 and the GeForce MX450. That's not all that was added. In this release they hooked up support for a new device-local VkMemoryType which is host-coherent and host-visible, which they said may lead to better performance for running certain titles with the DXVK translation layer like DiRT Rally 2.0, DOOM: Eternal and World of Warcraft. It also adds NVIDIA VDPAU driver support for decoding VP9 10- and 12-bit bitstreams.

Additionally they updated Base Mosaic support to allow five simultaneous displays instead of three, it now supports the NVIDIA NGX Updater, SLI Mosaic display configuration got its own dedicated place in the nvidia-settings app, they removed multiple SLI modes including "SFR", "AFR", and "AA" but SLI Mosaic, Base Mosaic, GL_NV_gpu_multicast, and GLX_NV_multigpu_context are still supported.

Plenty of bug fixes are included too, here's a list:

• Fixed a bug that caused X to crash when the NVIDIA RandR provider was disabled while using an NVIDIA-driven display as a PRIME Display Offload sink.
• Fixed a bug that prevented 8K displays from being used in portrait orientation on Pascal and earlier GPUs.
• Fixed a bug which caused excessive CPU usage in Vulkan applications which create a large number of VkFence objects. This was particularly prevalent in the Steam Play title Red Dead Redemption 2.
• Fixed a bug that caused WebKit-based applications to crash when running on Wayland.
• Fixed a bug that led to display corruption at some resolutions when using an NVIDIA-driven display as a PRIME Display Offload sink.
• Fixed a bug in a SPIR-V optimization that may cause conditional blocks to not execute.
• Fixed a bug where calls to vkGetRandROutputDisplayEXT with unexpected inputs would generate X11 protocol errors.
  (https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=49407)
• Fixed a small memory leak during exit of the NVIDIA EGL driver.
• Fixed several synchronization bugs that could momentarily lock up the X server when moving/resizing/focusing OpenGL and Vulkan windows when PRIME Sync was enabled.
• Fixed a bug that could cause dual-link DVI to be driven over a connector that only supports single-link DVI, when "NoMaxPClkCheck" is specified in the "ModeValidation" X configuration option. Note this fix may cause behavioral changes for configurations using this option.
• Fixed a bug where glGetGraphicsResetStatusARB would incorrectly return GL_PURGED_CONTEXT_RESET_NV immediately after application start-up if the system had previously been suspended.
• Fixed a regression that allowed displays to enter DPMS mode even when DPMS is disabled in the X server settings.

The release announcement can be found here .

NVIDIA have pushed out a fresh update to their developer-focused Vulkan Beta Driver series, here's the highlights and what's changed.

For starters it's now been rebased on top of their mainline 455 driver branch, which brings with it Ampere 30xx series support. So for anyone truly needing this series for all the brand-new Vulkan extensions and other Beta features, you should be good to go.

Other than that, here's what's changed in 455.22.04 :

• VK_EXT_global_priority support for Windows 10 with hardware scheduling enabled
• VK_EXT_shader_image_atomic_int64
• VK_KHR_copy_commands2
• Allow importing external host memory as cached
• Fixed a bug in a barrier optimization that allowed some back-to-back copies to run unordered

You can find the Vulkan Beta Driver here .

Reminder: you know it's a special Beta driver thanks to the additional two numbers on the end of the version string, with the newest stable version of the NVIDIA driver for Linux at 450.66 which released on August 18. This special Vulkan beta driver is where all the shiny new stuff goes in before making its way into the stable release for everyone. Really, it's mostly aimed at developers and serious enthusiasts. Unless you need what's in them, it's generally best to use the stable drivers. Not to be confused also with the 455.23.04 driver release that went out on September 17, which was a Beta version of their main series that released along with Ampere .

If you just want to know when a new stable driver is released, you can follow our dedicated Drivers tag .

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 .

Shortly after giving us a brand new stable mainline driver, the NVIDIA driver team have released a new developer-focused Vulkan Beta Driver.

A big change here is that the driver has been rebased onto the newer r450 series, bringing with it numerous other bug fixes and improvements there in past driver released. As for what's new to the 450.56.01 Vulkan Beta:

Features:

• Added support for the VkPhysicalDeviceRayTracingFeaturesKHR.rayTracingIndirectTraceRays ray tracing feature
• VK_NV_device_diagnostics_config

Fixes:

• Make the pSizes parameters of vkCmdBindVertexBuffers2EXT be relative to the pBuffers+pOffsets
• Fixed potential crash in the first vkQueuePresentKHR() call after creating a new VkSwapchainKHR with a non-NULL oldSwapchain
• Fixed potential crash in vkCmdBeginRenderPass() when using VK_EXT_sample_locations

Reminder: you know it's a special Beta driver thanks to the additional two numbers on the end of the version string, with the newest stable version of the NVIDIA driver for Linux at 450.57 which released on July 9 . This special Vulkan beta driver is where all the shiny new stuff goes in before making its way into the stable release for everyone. Really, it's mostly aimed at developers and serious enthusiasts. Unless you need what's in them, it's generally best to use the stable drivers.

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.