The open-source Qualcomm Adreno Vulkan driver within Mesa known as “TURNIP” has now matured enough that it’s going to be built by default when compiling Mesa for ARM64/AArch64 hardware.
Turnip now joins the software rasterizer “swrast”, the Intel ANV driver, and Panfrost for Arm Mali as being on the default AArch64 driver list when building Mesa. Granted, the Vulkan driver list is configurable by default for any architecture and not all AArch64 hardware has Qualcomm Adreno graphics, but making it to the default list will help with better exposure as well as out-of-the-box build testing on 64-bit ARM.
Turnip has seen much progress in recent years for bettering the open-source Vulkan API support with Adreno hardware and paired with the MSM kernel driver. The patch promoting Turnip to the default driver list simply reads:
“On Aarch64 enable freedreno Vulkan driver (turnip) by default. It is stable enough to be enabled by default on the relevant platform.”
This promotion was merged yesterday to Mesa Git ahead of next quarter’s Mesa 25.1 release.
