After the 22 patches were under review for the past eight months, merged today is the NVK Vulkan driver support for the VK_EXT_image_drm_format_modifier extension for handling DRM format modifiers.

Mesa 24.2-devel now has DRM modifiers support with this open-source Vulkan driver! Faith Ekstrand who spearheaded the DRM format modifier support for the NVK Vulkan driver warned of the complexities of the implementation in part due to the Nouveau Gallium3D OpenGL driver being "dangerously broken" around Direct Rendering Manager modifiers.

[1]The merge request outlines the complexities of implementing the DRM modifiers support for NVK and how the interoperability with the Nouveau Gallium3D driver is hampered due to its botched implementation.

With this DRM modifier support, the NVK Vulkan driver has also been successfully tested now by Ekstrand using Valve's Gamescope compositor.

The NVK driver continues coming along quite briskly and will be exciting to see what more features are prepped for next quarter's Mesa 24.2 release. I'll have out fresh open-source NVIDIA Linux graphics benchmarks soon on Phoronix.



[1] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/merge_requests/24795