Shiva is entering development for Mesa Vulkan drivers as a new framework akin to Gallium3D but for Vulkan drivers rather than OpenGL. It's going to be some time before the work will come to fruition but should hopefully lead to more code sharing and a better Mesa Vulkan driver development experience in the future.

Faith Ekstrand of Collabora presented at XDC 2026 today in Toronto over the idea of Gallium3D for Vulkan drivers. With the growing API of Vulkan, Ekstrand acknowledged that the status quo is no longer working out so well. There is increasing fragmentation between Mesa Vulkan drivers, various conversions / helpers, and other increasing complexities in developing Vulkan hardware drivers.

Shiva is being proposed as a to-be-developed framework/infrastructure within Mesa for serving Vulkan drivers in a similar way to that Gallium3D has done well for OpenGL drivers. Shiva would serve as an abstraction to the Vulkan API with Ekstrand noting "– Vulkan was fun and easy to implement in 2016...– Vulkan in 2026 is full of backwards compatibility cruft." Worse yet, Ekstrand forecasts that Vulkan is only going to get worse for implementing as it evolves.

Mesa Vulkan drivers would target the Shiva API rather than the Vulkan API directly to handle various abstractions. It's also forward-looking toward Rust drivers and more.

The plan is to begin developing Shiva in the near future and will initially work on adapting the Nouveau and Arm Mali Panfrostt drivers. The estimate is about two years though before it potentially bears fruit for users.

Those wishing to learn more can see the PDF slide deck and video recording from XDC embedded above.