Mesa News Archives

Mesa 19.2 fell off the release train and is now likely to be released more towards the end of September rather than the middle of the month or even the end of August as was their original time-table.

Red Hat's David Airlie has been refocusing efforts recently on improving the state of the LLVMpipe driver that implements OpenGL / OpenGL ES on top of CPUs using LLVM. In the past few weeks he's been wiring up more GL4 / GLES 3.1 extensions and this morning the latest achievement is supporting OpenGL compute shaders!

As a follow-up to the recent story on AMD looking to land Navi 14 support in the imminent Mesa 19.2, that code for the smaller Navi GPU did successfully land into Mesa 19.3-devel and was back-ported to the 19.2 series for the upcoming 19.2.0 stable release.

A number of months have passed since having anything new to report on the progress of the LLVMpipe software driver, but David Airlie now has landed a number of improvements to this LLVM-leveraging "soft" OpenGL driver for Mesa 19.3.

Mesa's RADV Radeon Vulkan driver just saw a big performance optimization land to benefit APUs like Raven Ridge and Picasso, simply systems with no dedicated video memory.

This week saw OpenGL 4.6 support finally merged for Intel's i965 Mesa driver and will be part of the upcoming Mesa 19.2 release. Not landed yet but coming soon is the newer Intel "Iris" Gallium3D driver also seeing OpenGL 4.6 support.

Yesterday we shared that Mesa 19.2's release process would finally be getting underway with the first release candidate expected today following the code branching. Sure enough, that process began but now prominent Intel open-source graphics developer Jason Ekstrand is looking to get the OpenGL 4.6 support into this release.

Just hours ahead of the Mesa 19.2 feature freeze and days after the RadeonSI OpenGL driver added Renoir support, the RADV Vulkan driver has picked up support for this next-gen Zen 2 + Vega APU.

Mesa 19.2 was supposed to be branched marking its feature freeze two weeks ago on 6 August along with the issuing of the first release candidate. That milestone has yet to be crossed but should happen tomorrow.

AMD Mesa lead developer Marek Olšák has landed a set of improvements to the TGSI-to-NIR pass today for Mesa 19.2 to enhance the RadeonSI driver's support for using this intermediate representation.

Another set of patches was merged on Tuesday for the upcoming Mesa 19.2 to further along its Radeon "Navi" support within the RADV Vulkan driver.

Landing on Tuesday ahead of this week's Mesa 19.2 feature freeze is an experimental NIR compiler for the Etnaviv Gallium3D driver that provides open-source OpenGL driver support for Vivante graphics IP.

If all goes well Mesa 19.1.4 will be released on Tuesday as the newest stable point release to this collection of OpenGL/Vulkan drivers for Linux systems. Mesa 19.1.4 is bringing around four dozen patches that accumulated over the later half of July and it's particularly heavy on Intel ANV and Radeon RADV Vulkan driver fixes.

Eric Anholt who has near single-handedly been developing the V3D driver stack (formerly known as "VC5") for use by the Raspberry Pi 4 and other newer Broadcom boards as well as maintaining the mature VC4 driver stack he developed for previous Raspberry Pi boards has left Broadcom. But Broadcom's loss is to Google's open-source gain.

The excitement over the open-source AMD Radeon Navi graphics driver support for Linux gamers/users continues. On Tuesday the RADV driver saw support land for binning to boost performance but while Bas was doing that, Samuel Pitoiset of Valve posted patches allowing GFX10/Navi to support Vulkan transform feedback.

The latest change for Mesa 19.2 to better the new Radeon RX 5000 "Navi" series support is binning in the RADV driver.

If you are sticking to stable versions of Mesa, the Mesa 19.1.3 point release is out today as the latest and greatest version of this collection of open-source graphics drivers.

Landing this week in Mesa 19.2 for the Lima Gallium3D driver for Arm Mali 400/450 series hardware is a reworked GPIR register scheduler.

Later this month marks two years since the release of OpenGL 4.6 and just ahead of that date it looks like Mesa could finally land its complete GL 4.6 implementation, at least as far as the Intel open-source graphics driver support is concerned.

For those riding the Mesa 19.1 stable release train, Mesa 19.1.2 is now available as the second point release to this quarterly update to this collection of open-source OpenGL/Vulkan drivers for the Linux desktop.

It's 2019 and OpenGL 4.6 remains the latest version of this once predominant graphics API yet Mesa's Gallium3D LLVMpipe software rasterizer is still only exposing OpenGL 3.3.

A few days ago the Navi 10 support landed in AMD's open-source RadeonSI OpenGL driver within Mesa 19.2. It looks like landing in the next few days will be some follow-up work to address some features and performance for the soon-to-ship Radeon RX 5700 series.

AMD's Marek Olšák released a new version of the Mesa DRM library (libdrm) on Tuesday.

Mesa 19.1.1 is out as the first point release to this quarter's Mesa 19.1 series that was christened earlier this month.

Mesa 19.0.7 was released on Monday as the last Mesa 19.0 stable release, ending this quarterly update series from Q1.

Just a few days ago I wrote how the Panfrost Gallium3D driver continues making incredible progress for this community-driven, open-source graphics driver targeting Arm Bifrost/Midgard graphics. There's yet another batch of new features and improvements to talk about.

Debuting two weeks ago was the Mesa 19.1 quarterly feature update while due out early next week is the first bug-fix point release.

Panfrost only made its initial debut as part of the recent Mesa 19.1 release for providing open-source Arm Mali Bifrost/Midgard graphics driver support on Linux independent of Arm and their official binary driver. While the resources are limited, so far Panfrost is making stellar progress.

Last week an on-disk GLSL shader cache was proposed for the vintage "R300g" open-source Gallium3D driver for this OpenGL code supporting through the Radeon X1000 (R500) series. That shader cache support has now been merged into Mesa 19.2.

After being delayed by a few weeks due to a few blocker bugs, Mesa 19.1 as the quarterly feature update to this open-source multi-vendor graphics driver stack has been released! Mesa 19.1 is a huge update with several new drivers, performance optimizations, more mature support for existing Vulkan drivers, and other changes.

Why not start off your morning with a waffle? Waffle 1.6 was just released as this long-running but recently silent project providing a library that allows deferring OpenGL and windowing system selection until run-time for making software more portable across today's mobile systems and desktops and supporting both X11 and Wayland, among other possible options.

GL_MESA_EGL_sync is a new OpenGL extension for extending EGL's KHR_fence_sync synchronization behavior into the desktop OpenGL space.

At the end of May I wrote about Intel's Iris Gallium3D driver achieving performance optimizations with new NIR I/O vectorization functionality. The open-source Arm Mali "Panfrost" Gallium3D driver has now wired into this code too for better performance.

For those using Virgl to enjoy Gallium3D-based OpenGL acceleration to guest virtual machines on Linux, the Mesa 19.2 release paired with the latest Virgl renderer library should provide a very significant speed-up.

The Mesa 19.2 Git code as of today now has support in the RADV Vulkan driver for the VK_EXT_sample_locations extension that can be used for potentially enhancing anti-aliasing quality.

The newest feature arriving in Mesa 19.2 is the long in development EGL platform device code worked on by Emil Velikov.

The lead developer of the Panfrost open-source graphics driver stack, Alyssa Rosenzweig, has joined open-source consulting firm Collabora to continue work on this Arm Mali reverse-engineering adventure.

Mesa 19.1 is in overtime and today marks the fifth weekly release candidate as the developers try addressing the last two blocker bugs to get out this quarterly feature release.

A change merged to Mesa 19.2 last month has the R600 Gallium3D driver officially advertising OpenGL 4.5 support.

Mesa 19.1 had been aiming to ship before the end of May but blocker bugs once again have dragged out the release cycle. The current plan is to now issue a fifth release candidate this week with hopes of the final release being in store for next week.

Mesa 19.1 was due to be released by now but instead it's been another cycle been drawn out by blocker bugs delaying the final release. Instead, Mesa 19.1-RC4 was outed today as an extra release candidate.

The Intel Gallium3D driver has seen another performance optimization now merged into the Mesa 19.2 development code for its stable release next quarter.

We're quickly approaching the two year anniversary of the OpenGL 4.6 release and it's looking like the Intel/RadeonSI drivers might be inching towards the finish line for that latest major revision of the graphics API.

Mesa 19.0.5 is now available as what is expected to be the second to the last release in the Mesa 19.0 series.

If all goes well the Mesa 19.1 release will be happening in the next week or two. But for those wanting to help test this open-source graphics driver stack, Mesa 19.1-RC3 was released today as the newest weekly release candidate.

The past few months AMD's Marek Olšák has been working on primitive culling support for the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver and last week that code was merged into the Mesa 19.2 development code.

We are coming up on the Mesa 19.1 quarterly feature release hopefully by the end of the month while out today is the second release candidate for evaluating this next big update to these OpenGL and Vulkan driver implementations.

Christian Gmeiner, one of the leading contributors to the Etnaviv Gallium3D code for providing open-source OpenGL driver coverage for Vivante graphics IP, has posted a series of patches for "EIR" as a new back-end IR based on NIR and other modern open-source driver graphics compiler back-ends.

Karol Herbst of Red Hat who has been working for more than the past year on providing OpenCL support in Gallium3D's "Clover" state tracker via SPIR-V so it can easily work with drivers like Nouveau seems to be approaching the finish line.

The Intel Gallium3D OpenGL driver performance is now in good shape for this new open-source Intel Linux GL driver compared to its "classic" Mesa driver, but there are still various other features to be ironed out before this "Iris" driver can become the new default. One of the items now crossed off the list is GPU hang recovery.