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Ive been really confused by what exactly the intel and amd drivers are relative to mesa and I’ve been wondering if my understanding is a common misnomer… so to

Ive been really confused by what exactly the intel and amd drivers are relative to mesa and I’ve been wondering if my understanding is a common misnomer… so to put this all concise-ly, mesa was originally an implementation for opengl on linux (unix like?) systems but has since broadened in scope to be a sort of graphical software suite that include drivers for the likes of amd and intel?

pxc 4y ago
Mesa does include a pure software implementation of OpenGL, but it also includes various hardware-specific implementations as well. Gallium3D, whose name also appears in the title, is like an intermediate representation used to implement graphics APIs across all this hardware, and also to enable support for multiple graphics APIs (various OpenGL versions/standards, maybe Vulkan, maybe some other stuff). (Mesa also includes implementations of some APIs which are not based on Gallium.) Personally, these days I think of Mesa the very middle of the userland driver layer of the standard Linux and free Unix graphics stack, which sits between the kernel drivers and any display server. On desktop, if you're not using NVIDIA, Mesa has you covered (it also includes an NVIDIA implementation, of course! it's just one that has, until very recently, been hampered by NVIDIA's firmware design). (On mobile, I think things are weirder.) It's a little messier than that in reality; you can mix and match some components like Vulkan drivers from different implementations without uninstalling anything or rebooting on a per-application basis, for one thing. Some AMD users use Mesa drivers generally but a non-Mesa Vulkan implementation for specific games, for instance. But basically I think this > [Mesa] has since broadened in scope to be a sort of graphical software suite that include drivers for the likes of amd and intel is about right.
- 7speter 4y ago
  Thanks.

pxc 4y ago

Mesa does include a pure software implementation of OpenGL, but it also includes various hardware-specific implementations as well. Gallium3D, whose name also appears in the title, is like an intermediate representation used to implement graphics APIs across all this hardware, and also to enable support for multiple graphics APIs (various OpenGL versions/standards, maybe Vulkan, maybe some other stuff). (Mesa also includes implementations of some APIs which are not based on Gallium.) Personally, these days I think of Mesa the very middle of the userland driver layer of the standard Linux and free Unix graphics stack, which sits between the kernel drivers and any display server. On desktop, if you're not using NVIDIA, Mesa has you covered (it also includes an NVIDIA implementation, of course! it's just one that has, until very recently, been hampered by NVIDIA's firmware design). (On mobile, I think things are weirder.) It's a little messier than that in reality; you can mix and match some components like Vulkan drivers from different implementations without uninstalling anything or rebooting on a per-application basis, for one thing. Some AMD users use Mesa drivers generally but a non-Mesa Vulkan implementation for specific games, for instance. But basically I think this > [Mesa] has since broadened in scope to be a sort of graphical software suite that include drivers for the likes of amd and intel is about right.

7speter 4y ago
Thanks.