Initial Meson Build System Support Lands In Mesa

Landing in Mesa 17.3-dev Git yesterday is initial support for the Meson build system! Initially, this Meson build support just works for the Intel ANV and Radeon RADV Vulkan drivers.

Meson is the latest build system catching the interest of open-source/Linux developers. Meson has already been widely deployed throughout the GNOME camp among other areas due to its faster build times when using the Ninja back-end on Linux, better support for Windows, and less clunky than Autotools.

The initial Meson support has landed in Mesa, but currently just supports the ANV/RADV Vulkan drivers. Meson's build support for Mesa will build up over time but is being done gradually rather than being staged out-of-tree until it's all ready to go, considering the continuously evolving state of the Mesa code-base.

Obviously the existing Autotools and SCons (and Android) build systems will remain in Mesa for the foreseeable future, at least until the Meson support is at feature parity to Autotools. The VMware folks appear to be the main users of the SCons back-end for Mesa.

Landing yesterday was the ANV support and RADV support. Spearheading this Meson'ing Mesa work is independent contributor Dylan Baker who has been also working on libdrm Meson.