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:
Intel GMA, HD Graphics, Iris. See Intel’s Website
AMD Radeon series. See RadeonFeature
NVIDIA GPUs (Riva TNT and later). See Nouveau Wiki
Qualcomm Adreno A2xx-A6xx. See Freedreno
ARM Mali Utgard. See Lima
ARM Mali Midgard, Bifrost. See Panfrost
Vivante GCxxx. See Etnaviv Wiki
NVIDIA Tegra (K1 and later).
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:
DRI hardware drivers for the X Window System
Xlib / swrast driver for the X Window System and Unix-like operating systems
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