Mesa

Mesa is an open source implementation of several graphics APIs including OpenGL and Vulkan.

You can change the Mesa version using the hardware.graphics.package option as of NixOS 25.05.

Enabling Vulkan Layers

⏲︎︎

This article or section is outdated. Vulkan layers are enabled by default since we merged #196310. However, this is a good example on how to properly override mesa's package attributes. Further information might be found in the corresponding discussion. Please remove this notice once the information has been updated.

Vulkan Layers are not enabled by default in Nixpkgs. You can override the existing Mesa packages and specify them in config.hardware.opengl.

hardware = {
  opengl =
    let
      fn = oa: {
        nativeBuildInputs = oa.nativeBuildInputs ++ [ pkgs.glslang ];
        mesonFlags = oa.mesonFlags ++ [ "-Dvulkan-layers=device-select,overlay" ];
#       patches = oa.patches ++ [ ./mesa-vulkan-layer-nvidia.patch ]; See below 
        postInstall = oa.postInstall + ''
            mv $out/lib/libVkLayer* $drivers/lib

            #Device Select layer
            layer=VkLayer_MESA_device_select
            substituteInPlace $drivers/share/vulkan/implicit_layer.d/''${layer}.json \
              --replace "lib''${layer}" "$drivers/lib/lib''${layer}"

            #Overlay layer
            layer=VkLayer_MESA_overlay
            substituteInPlace $drivers/share/vulkan/explicit_layer.d/''${layer}.json \
              --replace "lib''${layer}" "$drivers/lib/lib''${layer}"
          '';
      };
    in
    with pkgs; {
      enable = true;
      driSupport32Bit = true;
      package = (mesa.overrideAttrs fn).drivers;
      package32 = (pkgsi686Linux.mesa.overrideAttrs fn).drivers;
    };

Nvidia users may need to apply this patch for the Device Select layer to work.

diff b/src/vulkan/device-select-layer/device_select_layer.c a/src/vulkan/device-select-layer/device_select_layer.c
--- b/src/vulkan/device-select-layer/device_select_layer.c
+++ a/src/vulkan/device-select-layer/device_select_layer.c
@@ -454,12 +454,8 @@
       exit(0);
    } else {
       unsigned selected_index = get_default_device(info, selection, physical_device_count, physical_devices);
-      selected_physical_device_count = physical_device_count;
+      selected_physical_device_count = 1;
       selected_physical_devices[0] = physical_devices[selected_index];
-      for (unsigned i = 0; i < physical_device_count - 1; ++i) {
-         unsigned  this_idx = i < selected_index ? i : i + 1;
-         selected_physical_devices[i + 1] = physical_devices[this_idx];
-      }
    }

    if (selected_physical_device_count == 0) {

Default drivers

In case you wonder where does ["auto"] in mesa's attributes lead you, this might be another way to see them (for 22.3.0[1]):

, galliumDrivers ?
  # Search for `gallium_drivers.contains('auto')` in meson.build
  if stdenv.isLinux then
    if stdenv.isi686 || stdenv.isx86_64  then ["r300" "r600" "radeonsi" "nouveau" "virgl" "svga" "swrast" "iris" "crocus" "i915"]
    else if stdenv.isAarch64 then ["v3d" "vc4" "freedreno" "etnaviv" "nouveau" "svga" "tegra" "virgl" "lima" "panfrost" "swrast"]
    else throw "Unsupported platform: this derivation only supports i686/x86_64/aarch64"
  else if stdenv.isDarwin then ["swrast"]
  else throw "Unsupported platform: this derivation only supports Linux/Darwin"
, vulkanDrivers ?
  # Search for `_vulkan_drivers.contains('auto')` in meson.build
  if stdenv.isLinux then
    if stdenv.isi686 || stdenv.isx86_64   then ["amd" "intel" "intel_hasvk" "swrast"]
    else if stdenv.isAarch64 || stdenv.isArch32 then ["swrast"]
    else throw "Unsupported platform: this derivation only supports i686/x86_64/aarch64"
  else if stdenv.isDarwin then  []
  else throw "Unsupported platform: this derivation only supports Linux/Darwin"

Intel Xe Driver Warning Spam

If you're using the Intel Xe driver you may end up getting a lot of MESA: warning: Support for this platform is experimental with Xe KMD, bug reports may be ignored. messages spam in your console when running various tools. You can disable this spam by setting the MESA_LOG_FILE environment variable to some file location (like /dev/null). To make the change permanent you could add it to your environment.variables attribute set in your nix config. The downside to this approach is that you won't see legitimate Mesa warnings or errors on your console afterwards.

Starting with Mesa 25.1.0, you can suppress the warning with INTEL_XE_IGNORE_EXPERIMENTAL_WARNING=1.