In addition to all of the contributions Valve graphics engineers have been making to the open-source Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver, they have also begun investing in improvements to the open-source Mesa NVIDIA "NVK" Vulkan driver too. With pending patches there is now explicit GPU synchronization support working for the NVK driver in conjunction with their Gamescope compositor.

Mohamed Ahmed with Valve's Linux graphics team has worked on the Nouveau DRM kernel driver and Mesa NVK driver changes to be able to support [1]explicit sync support for this open-source NVIDIA driver stack. Prominent Valve Linux lead Pierre-Loup Griffais [2]X'ed the good news on Friday night:

There is [3]this patch to the Nouveau DRM kernel driver for handling of VM_BIND buffer object allocations with PTE kind and tile mode. On the Mesa NVK driver side is [4]this merge request implementing Vulkan's VK_EXT_image_drm_format_modifier support for the NVK driver. These patches have yet to be upstreamed but great to see the NVK explicit sync support on the way. Meanwhile NVIDIA is expected to release a big binary Linux driver beta earlier this month baking their explicit sync support and other enhancements in their new driver series.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/search/explicit+sync

[2] https://twitter.com/Plagman2/status/1786544648389025928?s=09

[3] https://lore.kernel.org/dri-devel/20240430155453.21132-1-mohamedahmedegypt2001@gmail.com/T/#u

[4] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/merge_requests/28843