Iago Toral has rewritten the V3DV masking query code to improve the performance of the VideoCore Vulkan driver. Our implementation relies heavily on the CPU to do things like query resets and result replication, and some aspects of query availability tracking are handled by the CPU,” he explained in the merge request.

This new implementation handles all GPU-side query functions by scheduling compute shaders, which involves query availability, resets, and result replication. Currently, this approach only supports managing shading queries, but in the future some additional work could be done to implement Performance queries.

As an improvement to the open source Raspberry Pi Raspberry Pi graphics driver, more than 1000 lines of rewritten V3DV driver code have been merged into Mesa 23.0.

Hardware occlusion queries are features of the 3D API that tell an application whether pixels will be drawn when rendering an object. When the wraparound box is occluded, the drawing of objects inside the wraparound box is skipped. Although the feature exists, there are still two issues that affect its widespread use: the overhead of resolving the occlusion query itself and the delay in waiting for the query result.

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Intel has spent the last few months working on improving Linux drivers on non-x86 architectures. Previous development efforts have focused on kernel drivers, while today’s combined patch provides OpenGL and Vulkan open-source driver support for non-x86 / x86_64 architectures.

While most open-source Linux graphics drivers work well on different CPU architectures, due to the nature of open source and the Linux community, they have traditionally not needed to care about non-x86 support in the case of Intel’s graphics driver stack.

In the days when integrated graphics support was offered, they were obviously tied to their x86 / x86_64 CPUs. But now that they’re getting into the discrete GPU game with Arc Graphics and their Ponte Vecchio / Max series, it’s a completely different paradigm.

With the possibility of installing standalone Intel GPUs on ARM64 servers, RISC-V desktops, and libre POWER9 desktops, their graphics drivers need to address the x86’isms that have been built up in their code base over the years.

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