Mesa News Archives

For those sticking to the Mesa 18.3 series until the Mesa 19.0 release is officially out and sufficiently matured, Mesa 18.3.4 is now available as the latest point release for these open-source 3D drivers.

The newest addition to the Freedreno Gallium3D driver for open-source 3D on Qualcomm graphics hardware is enabling OpenGL compute support for A6xx series hardware.

A set of 38 patches have been sent out that wire in support for the VK_KHR_shader_float16_int8, VK_AMD_gpu_shader_half_float, VK_AMD_gpu_shader_int16, and VK_KHR_8bit_storage extensions to the RADV driver within Mesa.

The Panfrost Gallium3D driver that was recently merged into Mesa 19.1 will soon have better support for the Mali T600/T700 series graphics.

After yesterday's botched Mesa 19.0-RC3 release, Mesa 19.0-RC4 is now available while it's looking like two weeks or so until the stable debut.

Prolific open-source AMD Linux driver developer Marek Olšák has sent out his latest big patch series in the name of performance. His new set of 26 patches provide primitive culling with asynchronous compute and at least for workstation workloads yields a big performance uplift.

The latest weekly release candidate of Mesa 19.0 is now available for testing, but it's a very petite release due to failing to include all of the latest back-ported patches intended for this release.

Developers working on the "Gallium Nine" Direct3D 9 state tracker are working on supporting the NIR intermediate representation as an alternative option to the default TGSI IR used traditionally by Gallium3D drivers. In supporting NIR, Gallium Nine opens up to some interesting new possibilities.

Remember Zink, that project started a few months back for implementing OpenGL over Vulkan using Mesa/Gallium3D? While there may have not been too much to report on it recently, that side project by Collabora developer Erik Faye-Lund does continue to progress and currently allows for OpenGL 3.0 to be implemented and run over the Intel and Radeon Vulkan drivers.

Following last week's code branching / feature freeze for Mesa 19.0, the second release candidate is now available for testing of this latest quarterly feature release.

The in-development Mesa 19.1 graphics stack release due out next quarter will feature a new Gallium3D driver... The initial Panfrost driver for open-source, reverse-engineered ARM Mali graphics hardware support of newer generations.

Since the notorious S3TC patent expired at the end of 2017, this common texture compression implementation for OpenGL has been supported by mainline Mesa. It's now been extended to also support sRGB non-linear color components.

AMD's Linux graphics driver developers are preparing a set of Mesa patches that allow for compute shaders to be used for the video compositor render process within Gallium3D's video layer code.

Kenneth Graunke of Intel's Open-Source Technology Center team is the developer who has been leading the charge for the past year on developing the Intel "Iris" Gallium3D driver that eventually should succeed their "i965" classic Mesa driver for Broadwell hardware and newer. Today he issued a pull request for some improvements to Gallium3D's Mesa state tracker itself.

Mesa 18.3.3 was released today as the newest stable release for the current Mesa 18.3 series from Q4.

Fresh on the Mesa 19.1 development cycle, the Virgl Gallium3D driver that is used as part of OpenGL acceleration for KVM guests with VirtIO-GPU is seeing some improvements.

After its feature freeze and code branching yesterday, the first release candidate of Mesa 19.0 is now available.

The open-source, reverse-engineered Panfrost Gallium3D driver is now under review in an early form for potentially merging into mainline Mesa in the near future. Panfrost is the current open-source driver community effort around Arm's Midgard and Bifrost graphics units.

Mesa 19.0 is due to enter its feature freeze today, but the "RADV" Radeon Vulkan driver is seeing some last minute enhancements for this next quarterly feature release.

If all goes well, Mesa 19.0 will see its feature freeze this week and kick off the release process by the issuing of the first release candidate. Here's a look at some of what can be expected out of this Mesa3D quarterly feature update.

With many current ARM/embedded devices having their GPU render and display hardware split into different blocks, Mesa is seeing infrastructure improvements for making it easier to support new platforms in this split configuration.

As a follow-up to the story earlier this week about a Mesa EGL extension needed for a universal driver configuration GUI, that extension (MESA_query_driver) was re-merged into Mesa 19.0 now that the build issue was addressed. The developer behind ADriConf is also looking for ideas on further improving this open-source 3D driver configuration utility.

The MESA_query_driver extension for EGL is of fundamental importance if there is to be a "universal" graphics driver control panel / configuration GUI for Mesa 3D drivers. The extension briefly landed today in Mesa but ended up being reverted due to build problems.

While we are most often focused on the Radeon and Intel drivers within Mesa as being the most commonly used Mesa-based drivers on Linux systems, Freedreno and friends have also been seeing some nice improvements for Mesa 19.0 with its feature freeze quickly coming upon us.

Libdrm 2.4.97 was released today by AMD's Marek Olšák as the newest version of this Mesa DRM library. The main feature of this list is a newer, faster buffer object list API for the AMDGPU code.

Timothy Arceri of Valve's open-source Linux graphics driver team has landed patches in Mesa 19.0 that drastically reduce the amount of system memory used when firing up the Team Fortress 2 game.

With the Mesa 18.2.8 release at the end of December being the last release of that driver series, users should really consider upgrading to Mesa 18.3. Fortunately, Mesa 18.3.2 is out this morning with dozens of fixes.

Last month was a proposed patch that would have killed the Autotools build system within Mesa. Developers have decided for the upcoming Mesa 19.0 release not to eliminate this GNU Autotools support but rather to mark it as deprecated and require an extra flag in order to make use of it.

Lead VC4/V3D driver developer Eric Anholt of Broadcom has landed a batch of improvements to the next-generation V3D driver in Mesa 19.0.

It's been more than a month since the debut of Mesa 18.3 and the emergency 18.3.1 release while due the holidays and the release manager being sick, the next point release fell off the tracks. Mesa 18.3.2 is now being crafted and should be out in the next few days. Given the time since the previous release, Mesa 18.3.2 is heavy on fixes.

With Mesa 19.0 entering its feature freeze this week, the race is on for developers to land their last minute additions to this next quarterly installment of Mesa. Valve developer Samuel Pitoiset has landed support in the Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver for the new memory budget extension.

With just days to go until the Mesa 19.0 branching and feature freeze, it's a busy time on Mesa Git with developers working to land their latest changes into this next quarterly feature release.

For those with older graphics processors, rejoice as with the upcoming Mesa 19.0 driver release it might now be possible to have OpenGL 4.0 thanks to software-based implementations of ARB_gpu_shader_int64 and ARB_gpu_shader_fp64 finally being merged to mainline. The FP64 one is most notable with that being a requirement for OpenGL 4.0 but some older GPUs lacking that capability for bumping past OpenGL 3.3.

One of the major open-source GPU compute driver initiatives going the past year has been the Red Hat folks working on adding Nouveau SPIR-V support as part of allowing GPU compute to work for this open-source NVIDIA driver. By longtime Nouveau contributor Pierre Moreau has also been work on adding SPIR-V support to Clover, the Gallium3D OpenCL state tracker.

With Mesa3D having a nice release rhythm going on now for their quarterly, time-based release cycles, all of their planned major release dates for the year are now published.

Open-source driver developer Tomeu Vizoso of Collabora has taken to some Panfrost driver work for greatly enhancing the viability of this open-source, reverse-engineered ARM Mali Linux graphics driver.

At least until D3D9-over-Vulkan is in better shape, the means by which you can achieve the greatest Direct3D 9 performance right now under Wine/Linux is by using Gallium3D's "Nine" state tracker. Unfortunately though upstream Wine developers have been reluctant to support it upstream since its limited to just Linux and of that just Gallium3D drivers, but Gallium-Nine-Standalone makes this support easier to deploy across Wine versions.

Mesa 18.2.8 was released today as what is the final planned point release for the Mesa 18.2 series. In order to continue receiving OpenGL/Vulkan open-source driver updates, users are encouraged to transition to Mesa 18.3.

Mesa had another wild year with countless improvements to the multiple vendor OpenGL/Vulkan drivers, continued improvements by Valve and other companies to make these drivers better for Linux gaming, the Meson build system support took shape, new Intel and AMD Radeon graphics support was punctually added, and many other milestones achieved.

Mesa 18.2.8 is expected to be released before the week is through as what will likely be the final point release for the 18.2 series now that Mesa 18.3 is stable.

In the event you need to deal with software S3TC decoding rather than on the GPU in cases of hardware limitations or running within a VM, Mesa this week picked up a faster implementation.

Samuel Pitoiset of Valve's open-source Linux graphics driver team has posted a set of patches implementing support for shaderStorageImageMultisample. These patches are based upon work started months earlier by David Airlie and important for DXVK and for other Vulkan use-cases.

Should you still be utilizing Qualcomm Adreno 200 series graphics hardware, the open-source graphics driver support is getting better for this hardware that was Adreno's first offering a programmable pipeline and clock speeds up to 133MHz.

Given the proposed Libre RISC-V SoC that could function as a Vulkan accelerator by running the Kazan Vulkan implementation on it, I decided to have a fresh look at how the LLVMpipe performance is for running OpenGL on the CPU. Here are those tests done on a dual socket AMD EPYC server.

For those not yet prepared to move over to the Mesa 18.3 series, Mesa 18.2.7 is out today with the latest batch of fixes.

Samuel Pitoiset of Valve's Linux graphics driver team has landed some fresh patches in Mesa 19.0 (and also marked for back-porting to the stable branch) to help out the DXVK gaming experience for Windows games using Direct3D 11 that are re-mapped to run on top of the Vulkan graphics API.

Mesa 18.3 was released less than a week ago while today Mesa 18.3.1 was issued due to an error in the Vulkan specification.

While Qualcomm was busy hosting their Tech Summit this week in Hawaii, the independent open-source developers were pressing ahead with their reverse-engineered Qualcomm Adreno 3D graphics driver support.

Mesa 18.3 is now available as the latest quarterly feature update to these open-source OpenGL and Vulkan graphics drivers for Linux.

The sixth and final release candidate of Mesa 18.3 is now available for last minute testing of this quarterly Mesa3D update.