Valve backs RADV Vulkan driver port to Windows. Collabora is bringing Mesa's open-source RADV Vulkan driver to Windows, with the experimental port already capable of launching Counter-Strike 2. Collabora is working on an experimental Windows port of RADV, Mesa's open-source Vulkan driver for AMD graphics hardware, with Valve sponsoring the latest phase as the effort has reached a milestone, with Counter-Strike 2 now able to launch on Windows using RADV. RADV has become the de facto Vulkan driver for AMD GPUs on Linux, where it forms a key part of the Mesa graphics stack. Windows users, however, still rely on AMD's proprietary graphics driver, making the possibility of running RADV natively on the platform particularly significant. The project builds on earlier work by graphics developer Faith Ekstrand, who demonstrated at XDC 2024 that RADV could communicate with AMD's proprietary Windows kernel-mode driver through the Windows Display Driver Model 2 interface. Her initial implementation reverse-engineered enough of the private communication between AMD's user-space and kernel drivers to allocate memory, create queues, submit commands, and render a basic 3D scene. Collabora has expanded that PoC into a more capable native Windows implementation. The new work removes the dependency on WSL, reduces hard-coded hardware assumptions, improves command-stream handling and synchronization, and adds support for sparse bindings, tessellation, task shaders, and dynamic GPU capability detection. Although the driver does not yet pass the full Vulkan conformance test suite, its success rate has improved considerably. More importantly, the port can launch Counter-Strike 2 by starting the game with the -vulkan command-line argument. However, that achievement does not mean RADV is ready to replace AMD's official Windows Vulkan driver. The current implementation remains experimental, and several major technical obstacles must be addressed before it could become stable enough for general use. Collabora says that a production-ready implementation would require either a stable and documented interface to AMD's kernel driver or a compatibility library supplied by AMD that hides changes to the private communication format. Presentation performance remains another unfinished area. RADV currently uses a slower CPU-based presentation path on Windows instead of native DXGI swapchains. Supporting DXGI properly would require importing images from D3D12. Achieving zero-copy presentation would need additional cooperation from AMD and probably Microsoft. According to Collabora, zero-copy swaps could deliver performance improvements of up to three times in applications not limited by GPU processing power. However, that is still a future optimization rather than a capability of the current driver. Despite these limitations, the project demonstrates that Mesa's open-source AMD Vulkan driver can run beyond Linux and support genuine Windows gaming workloads. The Windows RADV work is currently available in a development branch rather than Mesa's main codebase, and Collabora has not announced a release schedule for an end-user driver. For now, it is still considered a technical experiment. Tell others: Bobby borisov. Bobby, an editor-in-chief at Linuxiac, is a Linux professional with over 20 years of experience. With a strong focus on Linux and open-source software, he has worked as a Senior Linux System Administrator, Software Developer, and DevOps Engineer for small and large multinational companies.

Making new strides at AWE. Kara Bembridge May 29, 2023 Reading time: 2 minutes Set in the heart of Silicon Valley, XR enthusiasts are eagerly awaiting to see the latest advancements on display at Augmented World Expo (AWE) 2023. Over 5,000 attendees will be headed to Santa Clara this Wednesday, May 31, to catch a firsthand glimpse of XR business thriving. It's been quite some time since Collabora last exhibited at AWE (with its friends Vrvana & their Totem headset), but Collabora Ltd is excited to be back to provide a spotlight for open source XR, and share what Collabora Ltd has been up to! For the very first time at AWE, Collabora will be showcasing Monado, a complete end-to-end open source XR platform that runs on Linux. Years of work have been spent to make this possible and Collabora Ltd is thrilled to show the strides that Collabora Ltd has made. To see how an XR reference platform can be OpenXR(tm) compliant, pop by Booth 930 to take a look! Collabora Ltd'll also have two demos running in parallel: * Productivity-focused AR running on xrdesktop on the North Star, the open-source Augmented-Reality headset with home-brewed inside-out tracking. * Game-Engine-oriented VR showcasing home-brewed open-source SLAM and hand-tracking in a few Unreal(tm)-powered demos. Collabora's XR team has the experience and knowledge to assist your organization in developing XR-related products and applications that push the boundaries of human-computer interaction in the modern world. If you are planning on attending and would like to meet to discuss your current XR projects, please get in touch! 28/07/2026 RADV's experimental Windows port brings Mesa's open source Vulkan driver for AMD GPUs closer to running real workloads, while highlighting... 17/07/2026 The Holo Core aarch64 preview provides early binaries, sources, and containers for an Arch Linux-based aarch64 port, backed by tooling and... 16/07/2026 Weston 16 expands HDR and color management support, improves Perfetto debugging and DRM backend performance, and adds new protocol and renderer...

Kernel 5.16: A new release for a new year. André Almeida January 20, 2022 Reading time: 10 minutes What's more refreshing than a new kernel release to start a new year? 2021 was a year with all sorts of challenges, from fighting the pandemic to deep diving complex technical problems. In case you missed it, have a look at its Year in Review for a summary of the accomplishments made by its kernel team over the last year. With kernel 5.16 made available earlier this month, the community has once again produced a release full of great features, like improving memory management performance via folio's API and better scheduler awareness of CPU topologies that share L2/L3 caches. You can read more about these, and other highlights, over at LWN (part1, part2) and at Kernel Newbies. More importantly, this latest release sees the culmination of two projects that had been in development for some time by its kernel team. Collaborans contributed both the new futex syscall and the new fanotify event, two new APIs which took long hours of research and cooperation with the kernel development community to come to fruition. It's great to see the hard work of its kernel experts paying off! futex is a syscall provided by the kernel to allow userspace to implement fast mutexes and other sync mechanisms. However, the current futex interface lacks some modern features ("futex2" is the name of the project to research a new interface), like the ability to wait on multiple futexes at the same time. This is especially useful for Steam's Proton (a tool to run Windows games in Linux), given that it is a nice way to emulate WaitForMultipleObjects from Windows API. Through considerable effort, its team implemented a new syscall to enable this behavior which landed in this kernel release: futex_waitv. This syscall finally enables userspace to wait on multiple futexes at once and will be also used by native game engines to better enable locking patterns from the Windows world. If you would like to learn more about futex, stay tuned for an upcoming blog post series that will take a deep dive into this important system call and how it is used to process synchronization functions. Notification of file system errors through fanotify. While Collabora Ltd, as kernel developers, try to fix as many bugs as possible, users are particularly sensitive to their file systems crashing, as that might cost them their valuable data. For that reason, every file system used in production has tools to try to recover from those crashes. To interact with those tools, Collabora Ltd worked on a new fanotify event for error notification, called FAN_FS_ERROR. This will be really useful for cloud providers to enhance their quality of service and better manage their resources. You can read more about it here. SoC support. As always, Collabora Ltd keep improving Linux hardware support. In this release, Collabora Ltd enabled hardware video encoding and decoding on sdm630/636/660 platforms, along with fixes for Mediatek, Qualcomm and Hantro platforms. Collabora keeps pushing to increase open source efficiency in the embedded world through its skilled engineers. Andrej looked again at the driver which enables the use of U2FZero as an entropy source for the random number generator subsystem, and fixed bugs causing occasional freezes during the initial USB communication. He also added support for a hardware variant produced by NitroKey. Below is a full list of contributions made by Collaborans for the 5.16 release, as recorded in the git commit history: Alyssa Rosenzweig (1): Andrej Shadura (4): André Almeida (10): AngeloGioacchino Del Regno (9): Arnaud Ferraris (2): Benjamin Gaignard (3): Boris Brezillon (2): Dafna Hirschfeld (1): Daniel Almeida (1): Enric Balletbo i Serra (7): Ezequiel Garcia (4): Gabriel Krisman Bertazi (30): Martyn Welch (1): Nicolas Dufresne (1): Nícolas F. R. A. Prado (1): Maintainer committed (44): Enric Balletbo i Serra (10): Sebastian Reichel (34): Signed-off-by (28): André Almeida (16): Ezequiel Garcia (1): Gabriel Krisman Bertazi (3): Sebastian Reichel (8): Reviewed-by (46): Alyssa Rosenzweig (2): André Almeida (15): Benjamin Gaignard (1): Boris Brezillon (5): Dafna Hirschfeld (7): Daniel Stone (1): Emil Velikov (1): Enric Balletbo i Serra (2): Ezequiel Garcia (5): Gabriel Krisman Bertazi (1): Nicolas Dufresne (2): Pekka Paalanen (1): Sebastian Reichel (3): Acked-by (8): Alyssa Rosenzweig (1): Daniel Stone (1): Enric Balletbo i Serra (1): Helen Koike (3): Pekka Paalanen (1): Sebastian Reichel (1): Tested-by (4): Corentin Noël (1): Enric Balletbo i Serra (1): Martyn Welch (1): Sebastian Reichel (1): Reported-by (2): Gabriel Krisman Bertazi (1): Martyn Welch (1): 28/07/2026 RADV's experimental Windows port brings Mesa's open source Vulkan driver for AMD GPUs closer to running real workloads, while highlighting... 17/07/2026 The Holo Core aarch64 preview provides early binaries, sources, and containers for an Arch Linux-based aarch64 port, backed by tooling and... 16/07/2026 Weston 16 expands HDR and color management support, improves Perfetto debugging and DRM backend performance, and adds new protocol and renderer...