The Argon Forge project has been introduced, which creates optimized builds of key components of the Linux graphics stack: Mesa, Gamescope, DXVK, VKD3D-Proton, and Wine. The builds are distributed through APT repositories hosted on GitHub Pages and are aimed at processors with AVX2 (x86-64-v3) and AVX-512 (x86-64-v4) support. The project is targeted at users of the Devuan 6 'Excalibur' and Debian 13 'Trixie' distributions who want to maximize performance from the graphics stack in games. The packages use the library base of these releases and are not intended for installation on older distribution versions. The build scripts and GitHub Actions configurations are distributed under the MIT license.
Each project is published in two versions, differing in the target instruction set and the package version suffix:
- stable-avx2 (suffix 'avx2') — for processors with AVX2, BMI, and FMA. Suitable for most x86-64 CPUs from 2013 onwards.
- stable-avx512 (suffix 'avx512') — for processors with AVX-512, including AMD Zen 4 and newer.
To install, you need to import the repository's GPG key and add the appropriate codename to 'sources.list'. Example for Mesa: curl -fsSL https://argonforge.github.io/mesa-builds/public.asc \ | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /usr/share/keyrings/argonforge-mesa.gpg echo 'deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/argonforge-mesa.gpg] https://argonforge.github.io/mesa-builds stable-avx512 main' \ | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/argonforge-mesa.list sudo apt update sudo apt install mesa-libgallium mesa-vulkan-drivers libgl1-mesa-dri
A similar approach is used for the other projects: simply replace the URL and the key file name. The packages are built using Clang and the flags '-march=x86-64-v3 -mtune=znver3' or '-march=x86-64-v4 -mtune=znver4', as well as '-O3' and a set of alignment flags. For Wine, additional cross-compilation of Windows components is performed through llvm-mingw.
The build is performed automatically in GitHub Actions upon tag creation or manual trigger. Each release is accompanied by two archives with deb packages for the corresponding ISA variant. In addition to the APT repository, the packages are available in the 'Releases' section of the respective repositories. The Argon Forge build scripts do not modify the licenses of the original projects and only create binary packages with different compilation parameters.
Source: opennet.ru
