Open source NVIDIA Vulkan driver 'NVK' gears up for merging into Mesa

This is exciting as heck! Collabora developer Faith Ekstrand and various contributors have been powering through developing NVK, the open source Vulkan driver for NVIDIA.

It's come along rather nicely in such a short time, that they're now preparing to have it actually merged into Mesa along with the rest of the open source graphics for Linux.

A majority of the work was done by Ekstrand with Collabora, with Karol Herbst from Red Hat also doing "a lot of the ground work and has done a lot of debugging and figuring out what we need to do on various generations", plus Dave Airlie of Red Hat also doing a bunch of needed Linux kernel work.

What's the current status? According to the draft it has a "pretty solid set at this point" which Google Summer of Code developer Mohamed Ahmed working through YCbCr support and when that is done it should have Vulkan 1.2 support with plenty of features on top of that.

Currently they don't have everything needed for DXVK, VKD3D-Proton and Zink but they've got "most" of it. So perhaps it won't be too long until NVIDIA GPU owners can use Mesa to run Vulkan games, that would be pretty amazing.

As for hardware support, Collabora told me: “Initially, Turing (20XX and 16XX series) and later. Eventually, we want to go as far back as Kepler (6XX and 7XX series)”.

Their plan is to get it merged into Mesa once the Linux kernel patches are ready, so you'll need a newer or patched kernel to actually make use of NVK.

You can see the draft merge request here and Collabora announcement here.