Mesa 26.2 Released: Mesh Shaders in NVK and a Host of Vulkan Improvements

Mesa 26.2 has been released — the latest quarterly rollout of the open-source user-space OpenGL and Vulkan drivers used primarily on Linux. As usual, most of the activity centers on Vulkan, but there is notable progress in Zink (an OpenGL implementation on top of Vulkan) and in Rusticl (OpenCL built on Gallium3D) as well.

What's New

Among the key changes are optimizations for the Intel ANV and AMD RADV drivers, continued work on Vulkan Video, and further development of the NVIDIA NVK driver. Of particular note is support for the VK_EXT_mesh_shader extension in NVK: mesh shaders, which are replacing the traditional geometry pipeline, are now available on this driver too.

The KosmicKrisp driver, which translates Vulkan to Apple Metal, now claims Vulkan 1.4 support. For the Arm Mali drivers (Panfrost/PanVK), the new KRAID compiler was merged, along with support for the new G1-series GPUs — Ultra, Premium and Pro. Early work has also begun on support for AMD GFX12.1 graphics.

Not Just the New Stuff

Notably, the venerable drivers of the past got some attention too: R600g and R300g for older Radeon cards received a number of fixes. Rusticl, meanwhile, added OpenCL 3.1 support for asahi, iris, radeonsi, llvmpipe and zink.

As always, the release brings an impressive list of new Vulkan and OpenGL extensions. Among them are VK_KHR_maintenance11 and protected-memory support on RADV, VK_KHR_shader_fma for several drivers at once (RADV, NVK, panvk, anv), VK_EXT_conservative_rasterization and VK_EXT_extended_dynamic_state3 on panvk, as well as VK_EXT_descriptor_heap, enabled by default on ANV and RADV.

For developers, there is a new tool called Gamma — a means of inspecting acceleration structures and ray-tracing calls (for now, only RADV is supported).

The full list of changes is available in the official release announcement.

Source: Phoronix