Mesa 10.5 Is In Ubuntu 15.04 For The Latest Open-Source GPU Drivers

For Ubuntu Linux users who haven't tried the Vivid Verbet Beta 1 release yet, you'll be pleased to know that Ubuntu 15.04 is riding off Mesa 10.5 for having the latest open-source graphics drivers.

On Tuesday of this week, Maarten Lankhorst of Canonical uploaded Mesa 10.5-rc2 to the Ubuntu Vivid package archive. These Mesa 10.5 packages are being pushed into Ubuntu from the Debian Experimental repository and came just days after Mesa 10.5-rc1 landed in the Vivid repository to replace Mesa 10.4.x. Besides pulling in the newest Mesa packages from Debian, the Ubuntu developers had to re-base their Mir support patches for Mesa 10.5 given that Mir support is still not present in mainline Mesa. Mesa 10.5.0 will be officially released in the days ahead.

Mesa 10.5 brings many changes, especially for the Intel and Radeon drivers. However, core Mesa still lacks any OpenGL 4.x compliance. The highlights include Intel Skylake support, major work on the Raspberry Pi VC4 Gallium3D driver, RadeonSI enhancements, etc.

It's great to see Mesa 10.5 fitting into Ubuntu 15.04 given that Ubuntu 14.10 was shipping with Mesa 10.3. On the kernel side, Ubuntu 15.04 will use the Linux 3.19 kernel to provide the best possible stable DRM driver experience as Linux 4.0 will arrive too late for making the April release of the Vivid Vervet.