Mesa 25.1 to Replace Nouveau Driver with Zink/NVK by Default for NVIDIA GPUs
Until now, the Mesa graphics stack defaulted to Nouveau as the open-source graphics driver for NVIDIA GPUs, but starting with the Mesa 25.1 series, the old OpenGL driver will be taking a backseat in favor of a combination of the Zink Gallium driver and the NVK open-source Vulkan graphics driver, both developed by Collabora.
Zink is an OpenGL implementation written on top of Vulkan, while NVK is a Vulkan driver for NVIDIA GPUs, supporting Turing (NVIDIA RTX 20XX and NVIDIA GTX 16XX series) and later GPUs, Vulkan 1.4, and many other features. NVK will also receive support for older NVIDIA GPUs, such as Kepler (GeForce 600 and 700 series).