Mesa 25.2 is now available as the newest quarterly feature release for this set of open-source Linux graphics drivers predominantly for OpenGL, Vulkan, and video acceleration support on the Linux desktop.
Like usual most of the changes are dominated by improvements to the AMD Radeon RADV/RadeonSI drivers and Intel Iris/ANV drivers but the open-source NVIDIA “NVK” Vulkan driver continues picking up more hardware support and features too. The various smaller graphics drivers for IP found on different SoCs continues to be enhanced too along with the likes of Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan and other software adaptations within Mesa.
See our prior RC1 summary and the dozens of Mesa 25.2 articles to learn more about all the changes in this quarter’s release.
The Mesa 25.2 release announcement notes:
“This release includes some major house-cleaning of the window system code to remove support for deprecated functionality:
– DRI2 support has been removed entirely. X11 window system support is now only available through DRI3 or software paths. This should not directly impact users as DRI2 has been deprecated for some time.
– Support for the insecure legacy GEM names has also been removed and buffer sharing is now only supported using dma-buf file descriptors. This should also not affect users as dma-buf has been the preferred path for about a decade.
– Support for thread-unsafe libX11 has been removed. Mesa now requires libX11 >= 1.8 (April 2022) which calls XInitThreads() on load and guarantees libX11 is always thread-safe. libX11 must not be built with –disable-thread-safety-constructor since that disables the
XInitThreads() call.
– Support for EGL_WL_bind_wayland_display has been deprecated and is now hidden behind the -Dlegacy-wayland=bind-wayland-display build flag. In order for XWayland to work properly without EGL_WL_bind_wayland_display, distros will need to upgrade to Xwayland >= 24.1 (May 2024).Another important things is that, as announced during `meson setup` since 25.0.2, the Clover OpenCL implementation has been deleted. RustiCL is now the only OpenCL implementation available, providing support for more OpenCL versions and features and to more hardware than Clover ever did. It is not (yet) perfect though, so please report any issue you find while using it.
NVK has added a dependency on the rustc-hash crate, which has improved shader compile times by an estimated 12%. We believe rustc-hash is already widely packaged, so the hope is that this won’t pose much of a burden to packagers.
Speaking of NVK, it now supports NVIDIA’s Blackwell and Kepler architectures. The old Nouveau GL driver has not been updated for Blackwell and there are no plans to do so. Instead, Nouveau users will only get OpenGL via Zink+NVK on any GPUs after Ada. (Kepler users will still get the old Nouveau GL driver as it is still the default
pre-Turing.)HoneyKrisp, the Apple Vulkan driver, has seen significant performance improvements.
Users can expect the usual flurry of improvements across all drivers and components, including these new extensions & features highlighted by their developers (in no particular order):
– removed clover frontend
– VK_EXT_vertex_input_dynamic_state/vertexInputDynamicState on panvk
– pushDescriptor on panvk
– VK_EXT_vertex_input_dynamic_state on panvk
– VK_EXT_vertex_attribute_divisor on panvk
– supportsNonZeroFirstInstance on panvk
– GL_ARB_blend_func_extended on v3d
– dualSrcBlend on v3dv
– VK_KHR_maintenance4 on panvk/v10+
– VK_KHR_maintenance5 on panvk/v10+
– VK_EXT_direct_mode_display on panvk
– VK_EXT_extended_dynamic_state[2] on panvk
– Vulkan 1.2 on panvk/v10+
– VK_KHR_shader_quad_control on panvk/v10+
– multiDrawIndirect on panvk/v10+
– VK_KHR_draw_indirect_count on panvk/v10+
– VK_KHR_shader_integer_dot_product on panvk
– VK_KHR_shader_terminate_invocation on panvk
– VK_EXT_shader_demote_to_helper_invocation on panvk
– VK_EXT_shader_replicated_composites on panvk
– VK_EXT_depth_bias_control on panvk
– VK_KHR_shader_bfloat16 on anv/gfx125+ and radv/gfx12+
– VK_KHR_robustness2 on RADV
– VK_EXT_zero_initialize_device_memory on RADV and NVK
– VK_EXT_primitive_topology_list_restart on panvk
– VK_EXT_image_2d_view_of_3d on panvk
– VK_EXT_texel_buffer_alignment on panvk
– cl_khr_kernel_clock on freedreno, iris, llvmpipe, nvc0, panfrost, radeonsi and zink with llvm-19 or newer
– GL_KHR_texture_compression_astc_hdr on panfrost and asahi
– cl_ext_buffer_device_address on iris, llvmpipe, radeonsi and zink
– Completed OpenCL 2.0 coarse grain buffer SVM support for iris and radeonsi
– VK_EXT_shader_subgroup_ballot on panvk
– VK_EXT_shader_subgroup_vote on panvk
– Vulkan video support on GFX12 (RDNA4) for RADV
– VK_KHR_load_store_op_none on panvk
– VK_EXT_load_store_op_none on panvk
– VK_EXT_scalar_block_layout on radv/gfx6
– VK_EXT_inline_uniform_block on panvk
– cl_khr_fp16 on asahi, freedreno, llvmpipe, panfrost, radeonsi and zink
– GL_ARB_shader_clock on panfrost/v6+
– VK_EXT_texture_compression_astc_hdr on panvk
– MSAA with 8 and 16 sample counts on panfrost
– cl_khr_spirv_queries
– VK_EXT_depth_clamp_zero_one on panvk
– VK_KHR_depth_clamp_zero_one on panvk
– VK_EXT_depth_clip_control on panvk
– VK_KHR_maintenance9 on RADV
– VK_KHR_unified_image_layouts on RADV (RDNA3+), tu and panvk
– VK_KHR_vulkan_memory_model on panvk
– Vulkan 1.3 on panvk/v10+
– VK_KHR_present_wait2
– VK_EXT_descriptor_indexing on panvk/v10+
– cl_khr_priority_hints
– VK_KHR_maintenance6 on panvk/v10+
– CL_sRGBA and CL_sBGRA images
– cl_khr_extended_bit_ops
– VK_KHR_shader_clock on panvk
– GL_EXT_shader_realtime_clock on panfrost/v6+
– VK_KHR_shader_float8 on RADV (RDNA4+)
– GL_EXT_window_rectangles on r600
– GL_EXT_shader_image_load_store on r600/evergreen+
– GL_EXT_shader_clock on all drivers that support GL_ARB_shader_clock
– CL_UNORM_INT_101010_2 and cl_ext_image_unorm_int_2_101010
– timestamps on panvk/v10+
– VK_KHR_calibrated_timestamps on panvk/v10+
– VK_EXT_non_seamless_cube_map on panvk
– VK_ARM_shader_core_properties on panvk/v10+
– removed X11 DRI2 support
– removed EGL_MESA_drm_image
– removed pre-dmabuf wl_drm support
– deprecated EGL_WL_bind_wayland_display
– VK_KHR_shader_atomic_int64 on panvk/v10+
– VK_EXT_host_image_copy on RADV (RDNA1+)
– VK_KHR_cooperative_matrix on nvk/turing+
– VK_KHR_host_image_copy on panvk
– Vulkan 1.4 on panvk/v10+
– NV_timeline_semaphore for zink”
Great job as well to release manager Eric Engestrom for another on-time release.
