NEWSDESK
ZINK OR SWIM
OPINION
Faith Ekstrand is an engineering fellow at Collabora.
Starting with Mesa 25.1, Nouveau users will no longer get the old Nouveau OpenGL driver by default and will instead get Zink+NVK. Unlike most OpenGL drivers, which are written to target the underlying hardware directly, Zink is an OpenGL implementation written on top of Vulkan. We’ve been talking about this for a while but finally landed the merge request. If we did this right, most users wouldn’t notice beyond getting a slightly more stable experience with better performance.