Mesa 11.2 Features For When It's Released Very Soon

Besides Linux 4.5 expected this weekend, the release of Mesa 11.2 is also imminent.

Mesa 11.2 was originally scheduled for release on 11 March, but obviously that didn't happen with now being a day past then. However, unless an 11.2-rc4 release is warranted, Mesa 11.2.0 should be christened this weekend or early next week.

For those that weren't keeping up with your Mesa readings on Phoronix over the past three months, there are a lot of improvements, but sadly no OpenGL 4.x breakthroughs to any new levels. The Intel driver is still at OpenGL 3.3 (but soon should be well into a GL4 world once FP64 lands) and the RadeonSI/NVC0/R600 drivers are still at OpenGL 4.1 compliance. The LLVMpipe/Softpipe drivers haven't advanced into an OGL4 world. But a lot of individual extensions for the higher OpenGL 4 levels were implemented for Mesa 11.2 and should make for an interesting next Mesa release three months down the line when we could be seeing OpenGL 4.2~4.3 out of some drivers and thus the bump to Mesa 12.0.

A list of some of the implemented OpenGL extensions for Mesa 11.2 can be found via the tentative release notes. If you want to catch up with all of the Mesa 11.2 advancements there is all of our Mesa 11.2 coverage.

Some other items to mention include some early bits of GTX 900 support in NVC0 (of course, also need to be using Linux 4.6+ for the DRM support), core mesa improvements, video acceleration improvements, Direct3D "Nine" ST improvements, and more.

Besides not advancing the OpenGL support matrix, not part of Mesa 11.2 is the new Intel Vulkan open-source driver. Also sadly not seeing much love this cycle is the Clover Gallium3D OpenCL state tracker with AMD working on their other HSA/GPGPU compute components outside the tree. Mesa 11.2 overall is a great update and all open-source graphics users are encouraged to upgrade, but the next release (Mesa 11.3/12.0) should be even better!