Mesa 18.0 Planned For A Mid-February Release

Andres Gomez of Igalia has posted the initial schedule for getting to the Mesa 18.0 release next quarter.

Mesa 18.0 will become what's currently Mesa 17.4-dev in the current Mesa Git master tree. This is due to the year-based versioning scheme that was introduced at the start of 2017 rather than just bumping the major version number when hitting new OpenGL milestones.

The rough idea is to release Mesa 18.0.0 on 9 February, but that could be delayed by a week or two if additional release candidates are warranted... Just as we saw with the recent release of Mesa 17.4.0 getting dragged out by several extra weeks.

In order to target around a mid-February release date, the Mesa 18.0.0 branching and first release candidate would be around mid-January, currently set for 19 January after which the branching occurs and all new feature development would be for Mesa 18.1 in Q2'2018.

Weekly release candidates as usual come between RC1 and the official stable release. The rough schedule was posted today to Mesa-dev.

With aiming to get a release out by mid-February, it's hopeful that Mesa 18.0 will land in time for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and other H1'2018 Linux distribution releases.

So there's one more month left of feature activity before turning to bug/regression fixes for Mesa 18.0. Stay tuned for feature overview and plenty of benchmarks in the weeks ahead.