After four months of development the launch of the free implementation of the OpenGL and Vulkan API "Table 22.0.0", this being the first version of the Mesa branch 22.0.0 has an experimental status: after the final stabilization of the code, a stable version 22.0.1 will be released.
In this new version that is presented is notable for the implementation of the Vulkan 1.3 graphics API in the anv driver for Intel GPUs and radv for AMD GPUs.
In addition to Vulkan 1.2 support being implemented in emulator (vn) mode, Vulkan 1.1 support is available for Qualcomm GPU and lavapipe software rasterizer, and Vulkan 1.0 support is available for Broadcom VideoCore VI GPU (Raspberry Pi 4).
Mesa 22.0 also provides full OpenGL 4.6 support for the 965, iris (Intel), radeonsi (AMD), zink, and llvmpipe drivers. OpenGL 4.5 support is available for AMD (r600) and NVIDIA (nvc0) GPUs, and OpenGL 4.3 support for virgl (Virgil3D virtual GPU for QEMU/KVM) and vmwgfx (VMware).
Table 22.0 main novelties
As mentioned at the beginning, one of the main novelties of this new version of the table is that support for the Vulkan 1.3 graphics API was added and from which you can learn about its most important features. in this post.
Another novelty that stands out is that the classic OpenGL drivers that do not use the Gallium3D interface has been moved from the main Mesa composition to a separate “Amber” branch.
In addition to this “Amber” branch also moved SWR controller, which offered an OpenGL software rasterizer based on the Intel OpenSWR project. The classic xlib library has been excluded from the main build, instead it is recommended to use the gallium-xlib variant.
Also, we can find that in this new version of Mesa 22.0 the D3D12 Gallium driver with an OpenGL layer on top of the DirectX 12 API (D3D12) provides compatibility with OpenGL ES 3.1. The driver is used in the WSL2 layer to run graphical Linux applications on Windows.
Controllers Intel GPUs are enabled by default to support Adaptive-Sync (VRR), allowing you to adaptively change your monitor's refresh rate for smooth, stutter-free output.
For EGL, the "dma-buf feedback" mechanism is implemented, which provides additional information about the available GPUs and allows you to increase the efficiency of data exchange between the primary and secondary GPUs, for example, to organize output without intermediate buffering.
Of the other changes that stand out in this new version:
- Support for OpenGL 4.3 has been added to the vmwgfx driver which is used to implement 3D acceleration in VMware environments.
- Added support for Vulkan RADV (AMD), ANV (Intel), and zink (OpenGL over Vulkan) driver extensions.
- Added support for Intel Alderlake (S and N) chips to the OpenGL "iris" driver and the Vulkan "ANV" driver.
- The RADV (AMD) Vulkan driver continues to support ray tracing and ray traced shaders.
- The v3dv driver developed for the VideoCore VI graphics accelerator used since the Raspberry Pi 4 model provides the ability to work on the Android platform.
Finally if you are interested in knowing more about it About this new version of Mesa 22.0 controllers, you can check the details 09in the following link.
How to install Mesa video drivers on Linux?
Mesa packages found in all Linux distributions, so its installation can be done either by downloading and compiling the source code (All information about it here) or in a relatively simple way, which depends on the availability within the official channels of your distribution or third parties.
For those who are users of Ubuntu, Linux Mint and derivatives they can add the following repository where the drivers are updated quickly.
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kisak/kisak-mesa -y
Now we are going to update our list of packages and repositories with:
sudo apt update
And finally we can install the drivers with:
sudo apt upgrade
For the case of those who are Arch Linux users and derivatives, we install them with the following command:
sudo pacman -S mesa mesa-demos mesa-libgl lib32-mesa lib32-mesa-libgl
For whoever they are Fedora 32 users can use this repository, so they must enable corp with:
sudo dnf copr enable grigorig/mesa-stable sudo dnf update
Finally, for those who are openSUSE users, they can install or upgrade by typing:
sudo zypper in mesa