Platforms and Drivers

Mesa is primarily developed and used on Linux systems. But there’s also support for Windows, other flavors of Unix and other systems such as Haiku. We’re actively developing and maintaining several hardware and software drivers.

The primary API is OpenGL but there’s also support for OpenGL ES, Vulkan, EGL, OpenMAX, OpenCL, VDPAU, VA-API and XvMC.

Hardware drivers include:

Layered driver include:

  • D3D12 - driver providing OpenGL on top of Microsoft’s Direct3D 12 API.

  • SVGA3D - driver for VMware virtual GPU

  • VirGL - research project for accelerated graphics for qemu guests

  • Zink - driver providing OpenGL on top of Khoronos’ Vulkan API.

Software drivers include:

  • LLVMpipe - uses LLVM for x86 JIT code generation and is multi-threaded

  • Softpipe - a reference Gallium driver

Additional driver information:

Deprecated Systems and Drivers

In the past there were other drivers for older GPUs and operating systems. These have been removed from the Mesa source tree and distribution. If anyone’s interested though, the code can be found in the Git repo. The list includes:

  • 3dfx Glide

  • 3DLABS Gamma

  • ATI Mach 64

  • ATI Rage 128

  • DEC OpenVMS

  • Intel i810

  • Linux fbdev

  • Matrox

  • MS-DOS

  • S3 Savage

  • Silicon Integrated Systems

  • swrast

  • VIA Unichrome