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
• Microsoft Windows

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