Mesa 24.3 Lands "The Juiciest Refactor Ever" [Mike Blumenkrantz from Valve :"I'm gonna go full doomguy across the whole DRI frontend and everything it touches"]

UntouchedWagons , 7 hours ago

Can I get an ELI5 on what Mesa does?

sandalbucket , 6 hours ago (edited 5 hours ago)

It’s an open source linux graphics driver.

It is very widespread, despite being quite slow, because it works. It ships by default with almost everything, and is the fallback when card-specific drivers fail

Edit: what Max_P said

Max_P , 5 hours ago

Mesa is more than just the fallback, it’s literally the entire userland graphics stack for all the open-source drivers. Intel, AMD, it’s also where the Apple Silicon drivers for Asahi lives and more.

It’s not slow at all, unless you end up with the CPU renderer (llvmpipe/lavapipe) due to an unsupported graphics card. That’s usually NVIDIA users because nouveau isn’t great. But even then, when NVK comes out, it’s also in mesa.