Pixman as the open-source pixel manipulation library used by the X.Org Server and Cairo graphics library is out today with Pixman 0.46 as the newest feature release.

Pixman 0.46 delivers faster pixel manipulation performance on RISC-V hardware for SoCs supporting the newer RISC-V "V" Vector Extension. Engineers from Samsung contributed RISC-V "RVV" vector usage for various fast paths to enable better performance of this important low-level library. The Samsung engineers found very significant performance gains out of RVV usage with Pixman - some of the integer performance numbers are noted in [1]this merge .

In addition to the RISC-V performance optimizations with RVV, Pixman 0.46 also brings a fix for the ARM64 advanced prefetcher, a16b16g16r16 format support, CI improvements, code formatting updates, and other enhancements.

Downloads and more details on the Pixman 0.46 library release via [2]xorg-announce .



[1] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pixman/pixman/-/merge_requests/146

[2] https://lists.x.org/archives/xorg-announce/2025-April/003598.html