Along the years, FOSDEM and its Graphics Devrooms have featured many talks about the status of different Mesa3D drivers. But what is Mesa3D? How did the project start? How is it structured?

This talk provides a comprehensive introduction to Mesa3D, aimed at people who have some graphics knowledge, but have never written a GPU driver. We will trace the project from its origins to being the industry standard for several vendors nowadays.

More specifically, we will cover its architecture and components, how it translates API calls from standards like Vulkan or OpenGL into hardware instructions, how the shader compilation process looks like, and various other topics.

Attendees will leave with a clear understanding of what happens behind the curtains when they invoke a draw command.

https://mesa3d.org/