Mesa News Archives

While the Mesa OpenGL/Vulkan drivers have matured into great shape particularly over the past two years for vastly improving the Linux gaming experience on Radeon and Intel hardware, with Valve's Steam Play allowing more Windows games on Linux via Proton/Wine has opened up Mesa to needing a lot more optimizations, workarounds, and dealing with other intricacies. The latest receiving the special treatment is Wolfenstein: The Old Blood.

Following a few delays that pushed back its release date from August to ultimately today, Mesa 18.2 is out as this third-quarter 2018 update to the Mesa3D graphics driver stack most commonly associated with the Linux desktop's open-source Vulkan/OpenGL drivers for Intel, Radeon, and Nouveau (as well as many smaller drivers).

In addition to Mesa 18.2 expected today, also out this Friday is Mesa 18.1.8 as the latest stable point release for this important piece of the open-source Linux graphics stack.

Mesa 18.2 as the third-quarter feature update for this collection of primarily Vulkan/OpenGL drivers is expected to make its official debut on Friday.

Alyssa Rosenzweig and others working on the "Panfrost" out-of-tree Gallium3D driver for ARM Mali graphics hardware have now succeeded in bringing up the newer ARM Mali T860 graphics processor on this open-source driver.

Mesa 18.2 ended up having two unscheduled release candidates due to open blocker bugs, but those issues have been cleared up and so this official quarterly update should be launching soon.

Mesa 18.2 will be slipping into September with two open Intel driver bugs still blocking the official release.

The work done by Valve open-source Linux GPU driver Timothy Arceri to implement OpenGL 4.5 compatibility profile has been merged into Git master for next quarter's Mesa 18.3 release.

Mesa 18.1.7 ships with the last two weeks worth of fixes in the Mesa stable space. But overall this isn't nearly as big as past Mesa 18.1 point releases. Mesa 18.1.7 has some minor fixes to R600 Gallium3D, Intel i965, RADV Vulkan driver fixes, the Doom workaround has been back-ported to RADV, and a variety of other fixes.'

Prolific Mesa contributor Marek Olšák has landed support for more OpenGL / OpenGL ES extensions into the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver.

The fourth release candidate of Mesa 18.2 is out today rather than the final release due to open blocker bugs still persisting.

As covered earlier this month, Emil Velikov at Collabora has been working on EGLDevice support for Mesa. These EGL extensions originally developed by NVIDIA are being pursued by Mesa developers for better dealing with the enumeration and querying of multiple GPUs on a system.

Mesa 18.2.0 is expected to be released in the days ahead as the latest quarterly feature release to this collection of open-source user-space graphics driver components. As has been the case each quarter for particularly the past few years, these timed quarterly releases are quite feature-packed.

With the Adreno 600 series support going into Linux 4.19 for the kernel bits, the user-space OpenGL driver support for the latest-generation Qualcomm graphics has now been merged into Mesa.

If you are looking to enjoy id Software's RAGE or Doom VFR games this weekend on Linux via Wine, they should be playing nicer with the latest open-source Mesa graphics driver code.

Mesa 18.2 as the next quarterly feature release to the contained OpenGL/Vulkan drivers is about two weeks out if all goes well, but today for testing Mesa 18.2-RC3 is now available.

Mesa 18.1.6 is now available as the latest point release for Mesa 18.1 as the Q2'2018 release of this collection of open-source graphics drivers/infrastructure.

While Mesa 18.2 is baking for release later this month, Mesa 18.1 remains the currently supported stable series. Final release preparations are underway for Mesa 18.1.6 as the latest bi-weekly point release.

One week after branching Mesa 18.2 and issuing the first release candidate, the second weekly RC is now available for testing.

While the EXT_gpu_shader4 extension was written for the OpenGL 2.0 days a decade ago when the GeForce 8 series was NVIDIA's flagship products, AMD's Marek Olšák is now adding support for this extension to the Gallium3D drivers.

Last month AMD's Marek Olšák sent out a new extension for the OpenGL registry, AMD_framebuffer_multisample_advanced, and with the latest Mesa patches he has published this week the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver wires in support for this GL extension.

It's been a while since having anything to report on ADriConf but fortunately this graphical utility for configuring some open-source Linux graphics driver features is progressing.

Emil Velikov's latest Mesa work is on implementing support for EGL Device extensions for enumerating and using EGLDevices.

For the past number of months there's been Adreno A600 series support coming together within the MSM DRM kernel driver in large part thanks to Qualcomm / Code Aurora contributing code themselves. Quietly coming together as well is the A6xx Gallium3D support for allowing OpenGL acceleration.

As expected, the Mesa 18.2 feature development is now over with the code having branched. Now open on Git master is Mesa 18.3-devel.

Robert Foss at Collabora has recently been working on supporting the "kms_swrast" code under Android.

The mad rush to land last minute work ahead of the Mesa 18.2 branching has continued. The branching is set to happen today but there's been several notable last minute additions hitting Git.

In the mad rush to land last minute features into Mesa 18.2 prior to its code branching and release candidate phase beginning, David Airlie has settled OpenGL 4.2 support for the VirGL stack.

The latest notable patch series by prolific Mesa contributor Marek Olšák of AMD is on allowing ASTC texture compression support for all Gallium3D drivers.

While Mesa 18.2 is on track for debuting as the next stable feature release by the end of August, for those sticking to the latest stable releases, that's now Mesa 18.1.5.

Mesa 18.2 is going to be branched at the end of the month to mark the end of feature development for this quarterly Mesa feature release. This is a few weeks later than originally scheduled and has allowed for some extra features to land. Here is a look at some of the Mesa 18.2 changes on the way.

The V3D Gallium3D driver (formerly known as VC5) for supporting Broadcom's VideoCore V hardware and newer is reaching a better grade for OpenGL ES conformance.

It's been a while since last having any news to report on Freedrenon, the open-source, community-driven Gallium3D driver for providing accelerated 3D support for Qualcomm Adreno graphics hardware. But ahead of the upcoming Mesa 18.2 feature freeze, Freedreno founder Rob Clark has been landing a number of improvements.

Serving as the Mesa 18.2 release manager is Andres Gomez of Igalia. He's now pushed back the release plan by two weeks, although Mesa 18.2.0 still should end up shipping in August.

For those abiding by Mesa stable releases, Mesa 18.1.4 is now available -- in time for updating prior to any weekend Linux gaming or other activities -- for these open-source OpenGL/Vulkan driver components.

Another routine Mesa 18.1. point release is being prepared while waiting for the August debut of the Mesa 18.2 feature update.

The end of July marks one year since the release of OpenGL 4.6 but sadly it doesn't look like the Mesa drivers will meet that anniversary for having working open-source OpenGL 4.6 compliance in the mainline Mesa code-base.

A few days back I wrote about some Intel open-source Vulkan "ANV" driver optimizations that really help the Skyrim game under DXVK with Wine to allow for a playable experience with Intel onboard graphics. Those patches have now been merged into Mesa 18.2.

It was just four days ago that Valve Linux GPU driver developer Timothy Arceri was thinking it could take a while before having OpenGL 4.4 compatibility profile support for RadeonSI, but tonight that milestone is checked off the list.

For those planning to enjoy some Linux games this weekend while using the RadeonSI / RADV / Intel / Nouveau drivers, Mesa 18.1.3 is now out as the newest stable point release.

Timothy Arceri at Valve has been working a lot lately on improving the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver's OpenGL compatibility profile support. While he just posted GL 4.0 compatibility profile patches when he thought it would take a while before getting OpenGL 4.4 compatibility support in order, it turns out it wasn't as bad as anticipated.

For those sticking to the Mesa stable releases, Mesa 18.1.3 is expected to be out by this weekend and features a few dozen changes.

Eric Anholt continues leading the charge on open-source Broadcom VideoCore graphics driver support for Linux.

After getting the RadeonSI OpenGL compatibility profile support to GL 3.3, Valve's Timothy Arceri has been working on OpenGL 4.4 compatibility profile support. However, with one of those extensions taking a while to wire up, for now he sent out the patches bumping the support to OpenGL 4.0 under this compatibility mode.

The Freedreno Gallium3D driver now supports all extensions required by OpenGL ES 3.1 and is also quite close to supporting desktop OpenGL 3.3.

Keith Packard's long in development work for improving the Linux display stack infrastructure for better dealing with VR head-mounted displays is about rounded out with the new Vulkan extension support being merged into Mesa.

Thanks to work done over the past few months by AMD's Marek Olšák on improving Mesa's OpenGL compatibility profile support and then today carried over the final mile by Valve's Timothy Arceri, Mesa 18.2 now exposes OpenGL 3.3 under the compatibility context.

Back in 2012 when talking with Gabe Newell of Valve about open-source/Linux challenges one of the topics he was awed about was patents encumbering the open-source graphics driver progress. Six years later, Timothy Arceri working on the Valve Linux graphics driver team has freed Mesa's ARB_texture_float support from being built conditionally due to these patent fears.

New Mesa release manager Dylan Baker has issued the second point release of the Mesa 18.1 series.

Mesa has been plumbed in to support the ARB_sample_locations OpenGL extension and is now exposed with the Nouveau NVC0 Gallium3D driver.