NVK Vulkan Video Finally Merged Into Mesa 26.3 — H.264 Decode Only

Support for Vulkan Video has been merged into the NVK open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver for Mesa 26.3-devel. This is a major milestone for the driver, which has been under development for years.

The initial implementation supports H.264 video decoding. Work on H.265 decoding is also underway but currently causes the NVIDIA GPU System Processor (GSP) to hang, so it is not yet usable. As a result, only H.264 decode is functional with the current code. Because the feature relies on the GSP, Vulkan Video support in NVK is limited to Turing and newer GPUs.

The delay in bringing Vulkan Video to NVK was caused by two main factors. First, reverse engineering was required to understand NVIDIA's video acceleration hardware. Second, parts of the driver were written in the Rust programming language, which meant waiting for the necessary Rust driver infrastructure to mature.

The NVK user-space code also depends on a Nouveau patch that was merged into Linux 7.3. This kernel requirement is essential for the open-source driver stack to support NVIDIA Vulkan Video.

Mesa 26.3 is expected to be released as stable in November 2025, roughly around the same time as the Linux 7.3 stable release. The merge includes detailed instructions for building Mesa with NVK Vulkan Video support. After years of incremental development, this integration marks a significant step forward for open-source NVIDIA video acceleration on Linux.