Collabora’s Recent Advances in Open Source Boot Chains and Vulkan Drivers
This month, Collabora has announced two significant advancements in open-source technology. Firstly, the integration of the NVK project, an open-source Vulkan driver for NVIDIA GPUs, into Mesa 24.1 marks a major development in graphics driver technology. Secondly, Collabora has improved the boot process for Rockchip’s RK3588 by including an open-source BL31 (Boot Loader stage 3.1) in their Debian images, replacing closed-source binary blobs to enhance transparency and modifiability.
Last week, Collabora revealed their progress in developing a nearly fully open-source boot chain for Rockchip’s RK3588. Key aspects of this development include...
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NVK is now ready for prime time
Today, I'm proud to announce that NVK, the open-source Vulkan driver for NVIDIA hardware in Mesa, is now ready for prime time. I just landed a merge request which gets rid of the non-conformant implementation warnings and changes the Meson configuration option for NVK from nouveau-experimental to just nouveau. This will act as a signal to distros that it's now time to start shipping NVK to users. I can't speak on behalf of distros, but NVK will be part of Mesa 24.1 and you should expect to see it in either the spring or fall release of your favorite Linux distro.
Back in october, I announced that NVK had reached Vulkan 1.0 conformance on Turing hardware. As of today NVK is now a conformant Vulkan 1.3 implementation on Turing (RTX 2000 and GTX 1600 series), Ampere (RTX 3000 series), and Ada (RTX 4000 series) GPUs. Not only have we jumped forward three Vulkan versions, but the new test runs were done with the GSP firmware enabled and includes Ampere and Ada GPUs. Also, unlike the initial 1.0 run, there are no hacks this time. Every test we passed in those conformance test runs also passes on upstream Mesa.