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Mesa 24.3 Lands "The Juiciest Refactor Ever" [Mike Blumenkrantz from Valve :"I'm gonna go full doomguy across the whole DRI frontend and everything it touches"] (www.phoronix.com)

submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Can I get an ELI5 on what Mesa does?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Mesa is the cross-platform, open source implementation of the OpenGL, Vulcan and OpenCL protocols for use in creating graphics on screen.

It's the default GL library on Linux for when you want to write code that creates 3D graphics.

You can juxtapose it to Metal on Mac's or DirectX 3D on Windows.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

Oh okay that makes sense, thanks!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

It’s an open source linux graphics driver.

It is very widespread, despite being quite slow, because it works. It ships by default with almost everything, and is the fallback when card-specific drivers fail

Edit: what Max_P said

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago

Mesa is more than just the fallback, it's literally the entire userland graphics stack for all the open-source drivers. Intel, AMD, it's also where the Apple Silicon drivers for Asahi lives and more.

It's not slow at all, unless you end up with the CPU renderer (llvmpipe/lavapipe) due to an unsupported graphics card. That's usually NVIDIA users because nouveau isn't great. But even then, when NVK comes out, it's also in mesa.