A new driver for the GPU developed by Huawei may be integrated into Mesa, as per a recent announcement made by a Huawei representative. Huawei’s plan involves partially opening the project by making the Vulkan driver code based on the Mesa Vulkan Runtime and low-level components using the NIR intermediate representation available. However, they intend to keep the backend for translating the NIR intermediate representation into GPU machine code as a binary blob to protect the architecture of the GPU instruction set (GPU ISA).
These proposed semi-proprietary drivers by Huawei are facing opposition from key participants of the Mesa project, including individuals such as Dave Airlie, Alyssa Rosenzweig, and Faith Ekstrand. They argue that such semi-proprietary drivers should not be included in the core Mesa framework. To resolve this conflict, Huawei has been advised to disclose information about the architecture of the GPU command set if they wish for their driver to be accepted into Mesa.