We are running into issues upgrading one server that had Rocky 9.7 installed and which has 8 mesa-* RPMs installed, 6 of which are version 25.0.7-5. This is on an x86_64 platform.
The appstream and devel repos both have mesa-*-25.2.7.4 RPMs in 9.8 but neither location has a mesa-va-drivers RPM. If I go back to the vault and look at Rocky 9.7, the devel repo does have mesa-va-firmware-25.0.7-[345] RPMs.
Was mesa-va-firmware deprecated and dropped or is this RPM missing?
A quick Google search shows the following:
Red Hat intentionally omits the mesa-va-drivers (and mesa-vdpau-drivers) packages from its upstream RHEL repositories. This omission stems from Red Hat’s strict policies regarding legally encumbered or proprietary video codec patents, which affect hardware-accelerated H.264, H.265, and VC-1 decoding.
Since Rocky is downstream of Red Hat 9.8, I think that is your answer. One thing to note is that there may be a third-party repository (RPM Fusion) that has mesa-va-drivers-freeworldwhich might provide what you are looking for.
Thanks @sspencerwire, but your google search result is not useful here. The va package does not contain any codecs, so the fact that the package is missing is not due to the licensing issues but maybe was just omitted, a bug report would be useful to get it back. @dgoldsmith the va package is just a collection of links pointing to the gallium library which already contain the royalty free codecs(mostly for amd gpus and nvidia nouveau driver, intel’s driver va driver is not part of mesa). Just open an old va package and check the name and pointers of the links the package will create while installing and create them yourself. After that vainfo should display them. The gallium library is compiled by rocky devs(starting with redhat) only with royalty free codecs for obvious reasons so if you really want access to licensed codecs for intel you can use third party repos like rpmfusion or negativo17 and for amd and nvidia nouveau you need to rebuild mesa with “all” codecs yourself.
After a bit more research in this particular topic seems the gallium framework is not being compiled with va drivers as devs added a flag in the srpm spec file to only do it for non rhel distros like fedora. To fix this you need to recompile mesa on your own fully. Here is a patch for the current mesa version spec file. This will enable the va driver and also compile all codecs including the non-free ones. At the end of the build you will also see a va-drivers package.
--- mesa.spec 2026-06-26 10:49:04.179630386 +1000
+++ mesa_patched.spec 2026-06-26 10:59:45.271817065 +1000
@@ -4,7 +4,7 @@
%global with_vmware 1
%global with_vulkan_hw 1
%global with_vdpau 1
-%if !0%{?rhel}
+%if 0%{?rhel}
%global with_r300 1
%global with_r600 1
%global with_opencl 1
@@ -553,6 +553,7 @@
%if 0%{?with_opencl}
-Dgallium-rusticl=true \
%endif
+ -Dvideo-codecs=%{?with_va:all}%{!?with_va:none} \
-Dvulkan-drivers=%{?vulkan_drivers} \
-Dvulkan-layers=device-select \
-Dgles1=disabled \