The past several years Imagination Tech has been investing in an upstream and open-source DRM kernel graphics driver as well as a PowerVR Vulkan driver in Mesa. Their Mesa focus has exclusively been on the PowerVR Vulkan driver with the plans all along to use the [1]Zink generic OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation. With next quarter's Mesa 26.1 release, that goal is being realized with Zink now working nicely atop the PowerVR Vulkan driver for in turn achieving open-source OpenGL support on PowerVR.

In recent months the PowerVR Vulkan driver has implemented all the missing pieces needed to fully comply with Zink's Vulkan requirements. Their last major piece of the puzzle now achieved was extending Zink itself to work with Mesa's Kernel Mode Setting Render Only "KMSRO" framework. Zink had only supported devices where the GPU and display controller are managed by the same kernel driver, which isn't the case with PowerVR with Imagination only providing the GPU IP.

On the [2]Imagination Tech Blog today they are celebrating the milestone of Zink working well on PowerVR in Mesa 26.1. They will also be pursuing Vulkan 1.2 and OpenGL ES compliance for PowerVR graphics on this open-source driver stack.

A nice achievement and great seeing Imagination's PowerVR open-source Linux graphics driver stack coming together and paying off. Mesa 26.1 stable will be out in mid-Q2.

Moving forward as Vulkan continues to see more adoption from the desktop to gaming, it's likely other hardware vendors will pursue a similar Vulkan-only driver support model with relying on Zink for legacy OpenGL needs.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/search/Zink

[2] https://blog.imaginationtech.com/powervr-the-path-to-open-source-zink-and-opengl-es-support