Mesa 13.0 Planning For Release At End Of October, Might Include RADV Vulkan

Written by Michael Larabel in Mesa on 30 September 2016 at 06:27 AM EDT. 10 Comments
MESA
Following the mailing list talk over the past two days about doing the next Mesa release, plans are being discussed for releasing at the end of October and it might have just got a whole lot more exciting.

Emil Velikov, Collabora developer and Mesa release manager for the past several release series, has commented on that previously discussed mailing list thread. He mentioned he was secretly waiting in hopes of seeing the RADV Radeon Vulkan driver merged for this next release! He said he'd even be willing to see it merged even if it's "not perfect/feature complete."

David Airlie, one of the developers leading RADV, commented that he would be open to merging it but isn't too comfortable that it's not passing all Vulkan conformance tests yet. He commented, "It's probably fine if I just make a big printf on device creation that RADV isn't a conformant vulkan implementation yet. Sorta like what Intel do on the older GPUs. Otherwise I don't think merging it is a big job, it's 30,000 lines of standalone code, I've already merged the prereq patches, and I think any code sharing should happen in tree."

So now we are looking at potentially having this RADV open-source driver in mainline Mesa in time for the official release in one month. We'll see what ends up happening!

Emil Velikov laid out tentative plans for having the feature freeze and first release candidate on October 7th or the 14th, then having the second release candidate one week later, and then having a third release candidate or final release one week after that. Long story short, we could be seeing this next Mesa release -- with possibly RADV -- around 28 October.

For this next's release version number, if past tradition holds it is to be called Mesa 13.0 since OpenGL 4.4 was reached by core Mesa and the Intel driver. Core Mesa also supports OpenGL 4.5 although no hardware driver is officially exposing conformance. However, Intel developer Jason Ekstrand said he'd prefer seeing it version 12.1 rather than 13.0 already. So we'll see how that discussion settles if the Mesa versioning practices will change.

That's the latest so far on planning for the next Mesa release. Stay tuned to Phoronix for more details.
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