• Mesa 21.0 Feature Development Opens For Release In Q1-2021 - Phoronix

  Mesa 20.3 was branched this evening in marking the end of feature development for this Q4-2020 Mesa3D release that should debut as stable in December. This also means that Mesa 21.0 is now open for development.

  Mesa 20.3 bring continued improvements to LLVMpipe's OpenGL 4 capabilities, various new Vulkan and OpenGL extensions to the Intel/Radeon drivers, the RADV ACO compiler back-end continues getting in much better shape, OpenCL Clover has been seeing renewed attention, continued bring-up around RDNA 2 graphics cards, Intel Gen12/Xe Graphics optimizations, and much more.

• NVIDIA Extends Fragment Shading Rate Extension In Vulkan 1.2.160

  Vulkan 1.2.160 is out this morning as the newest revision to the Vulkan graphics/compute API.

  Besides the usual assortment of fixes/clarifications to the specification, Vulkan 1.2.160 brings one new extension. That new extension this week is NVIDIA's VK_NV_fragment_shading_rate_enums.

• Compute Express Link 2.0 Specification Published

  Just a year after the Compute Express Link 1.0 and 1.1 interconnect specifications were published, CXL 2.0 is being announced this morning for this high-speed, data center minded specification built atop the PCI Express interface.

Hi list,

I know this is coming rather late, but better late than never! Mesa
20.2.2 is now available, and includes numerous fixes. Please enjoy
responsibly.

Dylan

Also: Mesa 20.2.2 Released With A Random Assortment Of Fixes

• Zink OpenGL-On-Vulkan Hitting ~95% Speed Of Native OpenGL Driver Performance

  Zink as the Mesa Gallium3D implementation putting OpenGL 3.x/4.x on top of the Vulkan API is now offering near-native performance.

  Mike Blumenkrantz who has been extensively working on Zink in recent time with implementing much of OpenGL 4.x as well as enhancing the performance has made great strides in making this generic OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation a very capable alternative to dedicated OpeNGL drivers.

• Mike Blumenkrantz: Last Day

  This is a sort of bittersweet post as it marks the end of my full-time hobby work with zink. I’ve had a blast over the past ~6 months, but all things change eventually, and such is the case with this situation.

  Those of you who have been following me for a long time will recall that I started hacking on zink while I was between jobs in order to improve my skills and knowledge while doing something productive along the way. I succeeded in all regards, at least by my own standards, and I got to work with some brilliant people at the same time.

  [...]

  This does not mean that zink is dead, or the project is stalling development, or anything like that, so don’t start overreaching on the meaning of this post.

  I still have 450+ patches left to be merged into mainline Mesa, and I do plan to continue driving things towards that end, though I expect it’ll take a good while. I’ll also be around to do patch reviews for the driver and continue to be involved in the community.

  I look forward to a time when I’ll get to write more posts here and move the zink user experience closer to where I think it can be.

  This is Mike, signing off for now.

  Happy rendering.

• V3DV + Zink

  During my presentation at the X Developers Conference I stated that we had been mostly using the Khronos Vulkan Conformance Test suite (aka Vulkan CTS) to validate our Vulkan driver for Raspberry Pi 4 (aka V3DV). While the CTS is an invaluable resource for driver testing and validation, it doesn’t exactly compare to actual real world applications, and so, I made the point that we should try to do more real world testing for the driver after completing initial Vulkan 1.0 support.

  To be fair, we had been doing a little bit of this already when I worked on getting the Vulkan ports of all 3 Quake game classics to work with V3DV, which allowed us to identify and fix a few driver bugs during development. The good thing about these games is that we could get the source code and compile them natively for ARM platforms, so testing and debugging was very convenient.

  Unfortunately, there are not a plethora of Vulkan applications and games like these that we can easily test and debug on a Raspberry Pi as of today, which posed a problem. One way to work around this limitation that was suggested after my presentation at XDC was to use Zink, the OpenGL to Vulkan layer in Mesa. Using Zink, we can take existing OpenGL applications that are currently available for Raspberry Pi and use them to test our Vulkan implementation a bit more thoroughly, expanding our options for testing while we wait for the Vulkan ecosystem on Raspberry Pi 4 to grow.

• Raspberry Pi's V3DV Vulkan Driver Can Now Run The Zink OpenGL Translation Layer

  The V3DV Vulkan driver that provides support for the Raspberry Pi 4 and newer can now run the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan translation layer.

• AMDVLK 2020.Q4.3 Vulkan Driver Released

  It was just a few days ago that AMD engineers released AMDVLK 2020.Q4.2 as their newest open-source Radeon Vulkan driver snapshot while that has already been succeeded by version 2020.Q4.3.

  AMDVLK 2020.Q4.3 is a small update and the only official changes are enabling VK_EXT_robustness2 support for pre-Vega/GFX9 GPUs and updating against the Vulkan 1.2.158 API. There are also fixes for counter collection hangs with the RenderDoc debugger and fixing Vulkan app failures in conjunction with Mesa 20.1+.