Big Marge

Just In Time

By the time you read this, Kopper will have landed. This means a number of things have changed:

  • Zink now uses Vulkan WSI and has actual swapchains
  • Combinations of clunky Mesa environment variables are no longer needed; MESA_LOADER_DRIVER_OVERRIDE=zink will work for all drivers
  • Some things that didn’t used to work now work
  • Some things that used to work now don’t

In particular, lots of cases of garbled/flickering rendering (I’m looking at you, Supertuxkart on ANV) will now be perfectly smooth and without issue.

Also there’s no swapinterval control yet, so X11 clients will have no choice but to churn out the maximum amount of FPS possible at all times.

You (probably?) aren’t going to be able to run a compositor on zink just yet, but it’s on the 22.1 TODO list.

Big thanks to Adam Jackson for carrying this project on his back.

Written on April 6, 2022