Mesa News Archives

While Mesa 19.3 was just released last week, Mesa 19.3.1 is now available rather than on its bi-weekly release cadence in order to avoid the Christmas and New Year's holidays.

The Broadcom V3D Gallium3D driver within Mesa 20.0 now has initial support for geometry shaders as needed by OpenGL ES 3.2.

After a few weeks worth of delays due to blocker bugs the release of Mesa 19.3 is out today as a big end-of-year upgrade to the open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers for Linux systems. Intel and AMD Radeon driver changes largely dominate the work as always but there is a growing number of embedded driver changes and other enhancements for this crucial piece to the open-source 3D ecosystem.

Mesa 20.0 due out in Q1'2020 is now the magical release that is set to switch on RadeonSI NIR usage by default in place of the TGSI intermediate representation. What makes this IR switch-over prominent is that OpenGL 4.6 is then enabled by default on this open-source Gallium3D driver supporting Radeon HD 7000 series GPUs and newer.

The TURNIP Mesa Vulkan driver providing support for recent Qualcomm Adreno graphics processors and akin to the Freedreno Gallium3D driver has added an important performance-boosting feature.

One of the most frequent complaints we hear from Linux gamers running open-source GPU drivers is over the lack of the hardware vendors supporting any feature-rich control panels like they do on Windows. There are many Linux driver tunables exposed by these open-source graphics drivers, but often they can only be manipulated via command-line options, environment variables, boot parameters, and other less than straight-forward means especially for recent converts from Windows and other novice Linux users. ADriConf has been doing a fairly decent job as a third-party means of helping to improve the situation and now there is talk of it supporting Vulkan driver settings.

As part of the ongoing effort for Intel's plans to use their new Gallium3D OpenGL Linux driver by default on next quarter's Mesa 20.0 for Broadwell "Gen8" graphics and newer, another step in that direction was achieved on Friday.

Even with the holidays fast approaching Mesa developers continue to be quite busy in landing new features ahead of next quarter's Mesa 20.0 release. The Lima Gallium3D driver and Turnip Vulkan driver are the latest benefiting from the Git code.

In addition to the discussion over potentially dropping non-Gallium3D drivers from Mesa or otherwise potentially forking a portion of the code, AMD's Marek Olšák made a separate proposal about renaming the Gallium3D "state tracker" concept to being "API" implementations.

Mesa 19.3 continues running behind schedule but stands chances for releasing next week if the lingering blocker bugs are closed.

Longtime open-source AMD graphics driver developer Marek Olšák has kicked off a discussion over the possibility in the not too distant future of either dropping non-Gallium3D drivers from Mesa (and moving them off to a maintenance branch or the like) or forking some of Mesa's existing code to allow it to be better optimized for Gallium3D use-cases. Due to raised concerns, other possibilities are also being expressed like simply moving ahead with optimizing the Mesa code-base for Gallium3D at a cost of potentially hitting dead code more often with the classic drivers.

The Panfrost Gallium3D driver that is the open-source OpenGL community-led driver for supporting Arm Mali Midgard/Bifrost architectures now has stable support for the T720 GPU.

While originally Intel planned to transition their OpenGL driver default to the modern "Iris" Gallium3D driver rather than the longstanding "i965" DRI driver for Mesa 19.3, that was pushed back to Mesa 20.0 for introduction in Q1'2020. In aiming to make that revised milestone a reality, a new option has been added to Mesa 20.0 with the Meson build system for being able to indicate the Intel OpenGL driver preference.

More Mesa drivers continue to be embracing NIR as the modern intermediate representation shared between these OpenGL and Vulkan open-source implementations.

While Mesa 19.3.0 was supposed to be out last week, it didn't happen nor is it happening this week due to blocker bugs. Given the US holiday week, it's looking like Mesa 19.3's blocker bugs might not be cleared in time for releasing next week either, but in any case the Mesa 19.3 Release Candidate 5 is now available for testing.

While the Radeon "ACO" compiler back-end performance is already looking very good in the speed department over the AMDGPU LLVM back-end for the Vulkan driver as shown in recent benchmarks, it's getting even better.

A few days ago 7 Days to Die saw a performance boost on Mesa Git from its "glthread" threading implementation while now a number of game emulators have seen similar whitelisting.

Universal Bandwidth Compression is now enabled for the open-source "TURNIP" Mesa Vulkan driver.

Mesa 19.2.5 was just released earlier this week but now v19.2.6 has already been released due to the previous point release breaking IBM POWER builds.

Mesa 19.3 had been expected for release next week per their original release calendar, but as we are used to seeing for these quarterly feature releases, at least one if not more weekly release candidates tend to be needed for ironing out bugs. As such, Mesa 19.3.0 is now solidly looking like at least an early December release while Mesa 19.3-RC4 shipped on Wednesday.

Mesa 19.2.5 is out today as the latest bi-weekly stable update to the current Mesa 19.2 series.

In recent weeks AMD driver developers have been working on EXT_direct_state_access improvements within Mesa and following their latest code push today now support the D.S.A. extension for OpenGL compatibility profile contexts.

For those that are fans of the 7 Days to Die open-world shooter / horror game, the performance on Linux is now as much as 30% higher as a result of Mesa GL threading.

Mesa 19.2.4 was released on Wednesday as an "emergency release" after a bug was discovered that made last week's Mesa 19.2.3 version buggy for all OpenGL drivers.

The Adreno 640 GPU that is used by Qualcomm's Snapdragon 855/855+ SoCs is now working with the open-source Freedreno Gallium3D OpenGL and "TURNIP" Vulkan drivers with the newest Mesa 20.0 development code.

The second weekly release candidate to Mesa 19.3 is now available for testing ahead of the official release in the weeks ahead.

Mesa 19.3 is expected to be out around the end of November as the next feature update to Mesa3D, but in the interim Mesa 19.2.3 has been released as the newest bi-weekly bug-fix release.

Mesa 19.3 feature development is now officially over and Mesa 20.0 is open for development on Git master. This final Mesa series of 2019 comes with many exciting OpenGL and Vulkan drivers.

Similar to the flurry of Radeon driver activity in buttoning things up ahead of the Mesa 19.3 feature freeze, the Intel open-source crew has landed some last-minute bits around the Tiger Lake "Gen 12" enablement.

AMD open-source developer Marek Olšák is landing the last of his changes for the Mesa 19.3 imminent feature freeze.

With Mesa 19.3 embarking on its feature freeze this week unless the period is extended, Intel developers have been working on landing more of their Gen12 graphics code into this release for future Tiger Lake CPUs as well as the basis for their first Xe discrete graphics card.

The Zink Gallium3D code for running OpenGL / OpenGL ES over Vulkan has now been merged into the Mesa 19.3 development code.

Following a lot of work on the AMD "ACO" compiler back-end to the RADV Vulkan driver for GFX10/Navi, this experimental alternative to AMDGPU LLVM is about ready to go for these newest AMD graphics processors.

Mesa 19.2.2 was released on Thursday as the second point release to this quarter's Mesa 19.2 stable series.

Zink is the year-old effort led by Collabora's Erik Faye-Lund on developing a Mesa driver that maps OpenGL over Vulkan. It's now nearly within Mesa pending the merge request to actually add it.

More than one month has passed since Mesa 19.1.7 compared to the usual bi-weekly release cadence, but on Monday following the closure of remaining blocker bugs, Mesa 19.1.8 was released that also ends out this release series.

The Broadcom "V3D" Gallium3D driver that is most notably used by the new Raspberry Pi 4 boards now is effectively at OpenGL ES 3.1 support within the newest Mesa 19.3 code.

Landing this week in Mesa 19.3-devel were more functions being implemented around the big OpenGL EXT_direct_state_access extension.

AMD developer Marek Olšák has landed a "mega cleanup" to the Gallium3D Mesa state tracker code around its NIR intermediate representation handling.

AMD open-source developer Marek Olšák on Wednesday released libdrm 2.4.100 as the newest feature update to this Mesa DRM library.

Khronos president Neil Trevett was at this month's XDC2019 conference in Montreal and he clarified their position on accepting conformance submissions by the open-source drivers.

Mesa's TURNIP Vulkan driver that provides open-source Vulkan API support for Qualcomm Adreno hardware in recent weeks has been back to seeing new activity and this week more useful contributions are being made.

Back during the summer Eric Anholt who had been the lead developer of Broadcom's VC4/V3D graphics driver stack most notably used by Raspberry Pi boards left the company to join Google. In his place, the Raspberry Pi Foundation is working with consulting firm Igalia to continue work on the DRM/KMS kernel driver and Gallium3D drivers for this open-source graphics driver support.

Mesa's DRM library could soon be shifting to a date-based versioning scheme similar to what is already employed by Mesa itself (year.release) and the X.Org Server is also looking at similar versioning.

There still is another month until the feature freeze for Mesa 19.3 to end out 2019 and it will be a big one.

For the past year "Zink" has been in development as the OpenGL API implemented over Vulkan and done as a Gallium3D driver. That code by Collabora's Erik Faye-Lund will likely be merged to Mesa 19.3 in the coming weeks.

If you are a user of AMD Radeon RX 5700 "Navi" graphics and don't mind riding Mesa Git, the latest 19.3-devel code as of yesterday has several more GFX10 fixes/improvements.

Igalia is working on supporting OpenGL ES' GLSL marking of variables as "mediump" when the precision involving those variables can be lowered to half-float 16-bit registers. That in turn can help with performance when honoring that precision marking, which to date Mesa has ignored.

While there hasn't been too much to write on it in recent weeks, the Panfrost Gallium3D driver within Mesa for Arm Midgard/Bifrost graphics continues chugging along. The latest work on it is switching over to a new scheduler for Midgard.

One of the lesser known Vulkan drivers within Mesa is TURNIP but at least this week it's been seeing new activity after a recent lull of activity.