Mesa News Archives

Keith Packard's patches for improving the Linux infrastructure around VR HMD devices have landed within the mainline Linux kernel as well as in X.Org Server 1.20, but for rounding out the work, there still are pending patches for the Mesa Vulkan drivers.

The Etnaviv Gallium3D driver for providing reverse-engineered, open-source 3D graphics driver support for Vivante graphics hardware is currently pursuing NIR intermediate representation support.

Mesa 18.0.5 is out as the latest point release for the Mesa 18.0 release from Q1'2018, but it also now marks the end of the series.

For those waiting until the first point release of a new Mesa series before updating, Mesa 18.1.1 is out to kick off June as the first update to Mesa 18.1.

It's always great having more open-source graphics driver improvements to kick off a new month. Marek has started the day by volleying 14 new RadeonSI patches.

Mesa 18.0.5 is the last planned point release for the Mesa 18.0 series that debuted at the end of March as the Q1'2018 release for Mesa3D.

Marek Olšák of AMD has landed the recently noted updates to the OpenGL compatibility profile support in Mesa 18.2.

The only developer from Imagination Technologies that was active in contributing to Mesa has left the company and is now working for Intel's open-source graphics team.

With the recent Mesa 18.1 release there is OpenGL 3.1 support with the ARB_compatibility context for the key Gallium3D drivers, but Marek Olšák at AMD continues working on extending that functionality under the OpenGL compatibility context mode.

Following the news from earlier this month that FreeDesktop.org would move its infrastructure to Gitlab, the Mesa3D project has begun the process of adopting this Git-centered software.

While Mesa 18.1 just officially shipped last week, Mesa 18.2 as next quarter's open-source 3D OpenGL/Vulkan graphics driver stack update is scheduled for release in mid-August.

Samuel Pitoiset of Valve's Linux graphics driver team has been working on support for 32-bit GPU pointers for user SGPRs as his latest performance enhancement for this open-source Radeon Vulkan driver.

First time Mesa release manager Dylan Baker has managed to release Mesa 18.1 on time as the Q2'2018 quarterly update to this OpenGL/Vulkan driver stack.

The in-development Panfrost reverse-engineered, open-source driver for supporting ARM Mali T700 series graphics is now much more capable thanks to work carried out on their "half-way" Gallium3D driver in recent weeks.

Mesa 18.1 might be out this weekend but for those riding the Mesa 18.0 stable release series for now, Mesa 18.0.4 is the latest point release.

What was developed as the VC5 Gallium3D driver is now renamed to V3D and enabled by default in new Mesa 18.2 builds.

In addition to being able to plot the frames per second, CPU usage, and many other possible sensor outputs, the Gallium3D Heads-Up Display (HUD) is now capable of showing the frametime while gaming.

While Mesa 18.1 is expected for release this week, those riding the Mesa 18.0 stable series will also have an 18.0.4 point release coming in the next few days.

It's almost one year since the release of OpenGL 4.6 and while there is support outside of the Mesa tree, mainline Mesa still doesn't support this latest OpenGL revision due to the holdups around SPIR-V ingestion support.

While Mesa 18.0 debuted just about one and a half months ago, the fourth and final release candidate of Mesa 18.1 is now available for testing as the next quarterly feature installment to these primarily OpenGL/Vulkan open-source drivers.

In addition to the potentially performance-doubling AMD Kaveri fix landing yesterday in Mesa 18.2 Git, also hitting this next version of Mesa is Enhanced Quality Anti-Aliasing (EQAA) support for Radeon GCN graphics processors.

When using the latest Git/development code of Mesa 18.2 on Kaveri APUs you may find up to a 2x increase in performance if you are using the AMDGPU DRM driver rather than the default Radeon DRM driver.

Libdrm 2.4.92 is now available as the newest version of the Mesa DRM library that most notably sits between the Mesa drivers and the Linux kernel Direct Rendering Manager code.

While Mesa 18.1 is coming soon, the current stable release series for now is Mesa 18.0 with the 18.0.3 being released today as the newest point release.

The third weekly release candidate of the forthcoming Mesa 18.1 quarterly driver release update is now available for testing.

While Mesa 18.0 was just released a little over one month ago, Mesa 18.1 is already gearing up for release this month after going through two release candidates already. Here's a look at the new features of this second quarter 2018 Mesa 3D update.

Following the renaming of the VC5 DRM driver to "V3D" and the new driver on its way to the mainline Linux 4.18 kernel, Eric Anholt is now renaming the user-space VC5 Gallium3D driver to V3D and is also ready to enable it by default.

The RadeonSI Gallium3D driver now has patches available for Enhanced Quality Anti-Aliasing (EQAA) that is also known as Flexible MSAA.

Mesa 18.0.2 is now the latest stable release for Mesa3D while those wishing to ride the bleeding-edge version for these OpenGL/Vulkan drivers can try Mesa 18.1-RC2.

Juan Suarez Romero who is maintaining the Mesa 18.0 stable series today announced the 18.0.2 release candidate as what will be the second point release.

The Panfrost open-source driver project previously known as "Chai" for creating an open-source 3D driver stack for ARM's Mali Midgard hardware now has a working shaded cube being rendered using the open-source code as part of its new "half-way" driver based on Gallium3D.

Seemingly flying under our radar is that Mesa 18.1 has already been branched and the first release candidate issued.

In addition to Mesa 17.3.9 being released today, Mesa 18.0.1 also rolled out the door as the first point release to last quarter's Mesa 18.0 series.

For those still using the Mesa 3D release that debuted in Q4'2017, the Mesa 17.3.9 point release is now available while it's the last planned update for the series.

Mesa 18.0.1 is being planned for release on Wednesday as the first stable point release / maintenance update for this quarterly installment to Mesa 3D.

The Gallium3D Heads-Up Display (HUD) has matured into quite a useful option for Mesa users over the past several years. There is now a Gallium HUD "simple" option.

Mesa 17.3.9 is expected to be released at the start of next week as the final point release for the Mesa 17.3 driver series that was introduced back in Q4'2017.

The latest driver optimization work by Timothy Arceri on Valve's Linux GPU driver team has been working on function inlining within NIR rather than within the GLSL IR optimizations. The net result is faster NIR compile times that benefit the Intel OpenGL driver and also help with RadeonSI Gallium3D.

Last month I wrote about Broadcom's Eric Anholt exploring the use of AMDGPU's DRM scheduler within the in-development Video Core V (VC5) DRM driver. That work has panned out and looks like it will eventually work out for this open-source Broadcom graphics driver.

Landing in Linux 4.15 was performance counters support in the Etnaviv DRM driver as the low-level bits for exposing the hardware counters with this reverse-engineered, open-source Vivante graphics driver. The user-space/Mesa side code has now landed too.

Alyssa Rosenzweig who has been leading the charge recently on the open-source Mali T700 GPU driver that was called "Chai" but has been renamed to "Panfrost" is now pursuing a "half-way driver" approach to testing their knowledge of the hardware's command stream.

For those waiting until v18.0.1 before upgrading to the Mesa 18.0 series, Mesa 17.3.8 is now available as the latest release off this stable series from the end of 2017.

RadeonSI Gallium3D has caught up to the fellow Intel i965 and Nouveau NVC0 drivers in supporting the OpenGL KHR_blend_equation_advanced extension.

Marek Olšák of AMD has done some spring cleaning to the RadeonSI Gallium3D code in what he's calling a mega cleanup with 55 patches.

With the first quarter of 2018 now in the books, I ran GitStats on the current Mesa code-base as of this morning to see how things are looking for the year to date.

It looks like we're getting quite close to finally having OpenGL 4.6 in mainline Mesa.

While Mesa 17.3 started out very buggy, the developers have slowly been getting it into shape. If you are waiting to upgrade to the newly-released Mesa 18.0 until it further stabilizes with some point releases, Mesa 17.3.8 will be released in the days ahead as the latest and greatest off last quarter's driver code-base.

With support for the unreleased "Vega 12" AMD GPU seeing its kernel-side support coming with Linux 4.17, AMD's Marek Olšák has landed support for this scarcely detailed GPU now in their user-space OpenGL driver.

Mesa 18.0 managed to meet its Q1'2018 release target by just a couple of days... After being delayed a month and a half, Mesa 18.0.0 is now the latest stable version of this user-space driver stack most commonly associated with its OpenGL and Vulkan implementations.

With the latest Etnaviv DRM code there is now performance counters support for being able to read the hardware counters via perfmon domains. The patches have now been published for making use of these Vivante performance counters from user-space.