Platforms and Drivers¶
Mesa is primarily developed and used on Linux systems. But there’s also support for Windows, other flavors of Unix and other systems such as Haiku. We’re actively developing and maintaining several hardware and software drivers.
The primary API is OpenGL but there’s also support for OpenGL ES 1, ES2 and ES 3, OpenVG, OpenCL, VDPAU, XvMC and the EGL interface.
Hardware drivers include:
Intel GMA, HD Graphics, Iris. See Intel’s Website
AMD Radeon series. See RadeonFeature
NVIDIA GPUs (Riva TNT and later). See Nouveau Wiki
Qualcomm Adreno A2xx-A6xx. See Freedreno Wiki
Broadcom VideoCore 4, 5. See This Week in V3D
ARM Mali Utgard. See Lima Wiki
ARM Mali Midgard, Bifrost. See Panfrost Site
Vivante GCxxx. See Etnaviv Wiki
NVIDIA Tegra (K1 and later).
Software drivers include:
llvmpipe - uses LLVM for x86 JIT code generation and is multi-threaded
softpipe - a reference Gallium driver
svga - driver for vmware virtual gpu
swr - x86-optimized software renderer for visualization workloads
virgl - research project for accelerated graphics for qemu guests
swrast - the legacy/original Mesa software rasterizer
Additional driver information:
DRI hardware drivers for the X Window System
Xlib / swrast driver for the X Window System and Unix-like operating systems
Deprecated Systems and Drivers¶
In the past there were other drivers for older GPUs and operating systems. These have been removed from the Mesa source tree and distribution. If anyone’s interested though, the code can be found in the git repo. The list includes:
3dfx/glide
Matrox
ATI R128
Savage
VIA Unichrome
SIS
3Dlabs gamma
DOS
fbdev
DEC/VMS
Mach64
Intel i810