Mesa News Archives

If you want the Mesa 17.1 graphics driver stack in a semi-official manner on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS or 17.04 Zesty, X-Updates has been updated to this new stable release of Mesa that features many exciting changes.

The Etnaviv Gallium3D driver for Vivante graphics cores now has patches available for ETC2 texture compression.

We're off to another busy week in Mesa 17.2-dev Git space.

The Freedreno Gallium3D driver for open-source, reverse-engineered 3D driver support for Qualcomm Adreno graphics has another important performance feature.

For those that haven't yet switched over to the newly-stable Mesa 17.1 series, last quarter's Mesa 17.0 series was just updated with the v17.0.6 point release.

With Mesa 17.1 having been released this week, the release calendar has been updated for Mesa 17.2.

Not to be confused with the recently-landed OpenGL threaded dispatch support that recently landed in Mesa Git, Marek Olšák has now published a set of patches for threading Gallium3D for RadeonSI: moving the execution of all Gallium3D pipe_context calls into a separate CPU thread.

Mesa 17.1.0 is now officially available as the Q2'2017 update to this important piece to the open-source 3D Linux graphics driver stack.

Emil Velikov has announced the Mesa 17.1-rc4 test release and plans to officially release Mesa 17.1 tomorrow if no further issues come about.

The initial work towards ARB_bindless_texture support for Mesa has been merged to master.

Thomas Hellstrom of VMware has sent out a series of patches to correct the performance when DRI3 (Direct Rendering Infrastructure 3) is enabled for virtual drivers such as their VMWGFX Gallium3D driver.

The open-source Radeon Vulkan driver, RADV, has now passed another important milestone.

The third weekly release candidate to Mesa 17.1 is now available for testing.

Mesa 17.0.5 is now available as the newest stable release on the Mesa 17.0 series.

While Timothy Arceri at Valve had just made the change to a 5% cache size limit of your disk space from an original 10% maximum threshold, he's now changed it to just a 1GB cache limit.

Mesa previously had a hard-coded limit to not take up more than 10% of your HDD/SSD storage, but now that limit has been halved.

For those sticking to stable Mesa releases, Mesa 17.0.5 is being prepped for release in the days ahead.

Emil Velikov has released the second weekly RC release ahead of next month's Mesa 17.1.

Initial support for Radeon RX Vega support in Mesa landed for Mesa 17.1 at the end of March. However, this initial support was limited to OpenGL 3.1 while now patches have come to take Vega up to OpenGL 4.5.

Timothy Arceri at Valve has recently been working on OpenGL KHR_no_error support while now that initial code has been merged into Mesa 17.2-devel.

The latest milestone for the open-source, reverse-engineered Freedreno driver for Qualcomm Adreno graphics hardware is basic compute support for the newer A5xx hardware.

GLVND is the NVIDIA-led effort for the new "Linux OpenGL ABI" or basically the OpenGL Vendor Neutral Dispatch Library to allow multiple OpenGL drivers to happily co-exist on the same system. Mesa's existing GLVND support has been limited to GLX while now there is EGL support.

Emil Velikov has released Mesa 17.0.4 as the newest stable release to Mesa 17. Meanwhile, Mesa 17.1 is moving ahead for release next month.

Independent Mesa contributor Edward O'Callaghan has posted some early patches for supporting the OpenGL ARB_parallel_shader_compile extension in Mesa.

Mesa 17.0.4 will be released as soon as this weekend with more than two dozen fixes.

Intel's Jason Ekstrand has posted 21 new Mesa patches for adding the VK_KHX_external extensions to their ANV Vulkan driver. He believes the patches are now ready for merging and plans to land them for what will become Mesa 17.2.

Ahead of the planned branching and release candidate of Mesa 17.1 in just hours, Rob Clark has landed some last minute work for the Freedreno Gallium3D driver that provides open-source support for Qualcomm Adreno hardware.

In order to get Mesa 17.1 out on time, branching is happening today for this next quarterly update to Mesa.

Timothy Arceri, working for Valve on the open-source Mesa graphics stack primarily around Radeon hardware support, has posted early patches on his latest OpenGL extension upbringing.

Elie Tournier, the GSoC student developer who last year worked via GSoC on "soft" FP64 double-precision support for older GPUs lacking the hardware capabilities, has posted patches wiring up his soft implementation for Intel "Gen 6" (Sandy Bridge) graphics thereby allowing ARB_gpu_shader_fp64 support.

Samuel Pitoiset, one of the developers on Valve's open-source Linux driver team focused on better Radeon support, has posted a set of 26 patches for changes needed to support ARB_bindless_texture and is in the process of getting this feature working for the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver.

AMD developer Nicolai Hähnle has landed ARB_sparse_buffer support within the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver. RadeonSI is the first Mesa/Gallium3D driver supporting this OpenGL extension.

Timothy Arceri has posted a series of a patches to further improve the Mesa shader cache's hot and cold load times.

Last week's Vulkan 1.0.46 update added a new extension and it's now supported by Mesa's Intel ANV and Radeon RADV drivers.

Just as planned, Mesa 17.0.3 was released this weekend.

The latest RadeonSI OpenGL extension work done by AMD developer Nicolai Hähnle is on the useful ARB_shader_ballot extension.

Andres Gomez of Igalia has stepped up to the plate to manage Mesa 17.0.3 as the newest Mesa stable update. The plan is to release it officially by the end of week while today the release candidate is available.

Sure enough, following yesterday's libdrm 2.4.76, the hardware enablement patches for the upcoming Radeon RX Vega (Vega10) launch is now in Mesa Git.

Libdrm 2.4.76 is now available with among the changes being the updates needed for AMDGPU Vega10 support.

With Q1'2017 wrapping up this week, here are some fresh Mesa Git statistics showing how the development of this important OpenGL/Vulkan implementation is pacing for the year.

The open-source community-based "RADV" Radeon Vulkan driver has now enabled the sparseBinding feature.

AMD's Nicolai Hähnle has published his revised set of 25 patches for implementing OpenGL sparse buffer support within the RadeonSI driver.

While Ubuntu 17.04 is set to ship next month with Linux 4.10 and Mesa 17.0 as a big upgrade over the open-source graphics stack found in Ubuntu 16.10, if you switch over to using Mesa 17.1 and Linux 4.11 is the potential for even better performance. Here are some Radeon RX 470 tests in different combinations on Ubuntu 17.04.

There is a new feature to talk about for Etnaviv Gallium3D, the open-source reverse-engineered driver designed for Vivante graphics cores.

Building off the work laid by Timothy Arceri and others for enabling a TGSI (and hardware) shader cache in the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver as well as R600g TGSI shader cache due to the common infrastructure work, the Nouveau driver is now leveraging it to enable the TGSI shader cache for Nouveau Gallium3D drivers.

Last week an independent developer proposed replacing the build system of libdrm -- the DRM library that sits between Mesa and the Linux kernel DRM -- to using the Meson build system as a potential replacement to using Autotools. That has led to another colorful discussion around build systems.

The second point release is now available to Mesa 17.0.

Another Polaris 12 device ID was added to the RadeonSI driver yesterday. In AMD's other open-source driver components they have also been tidying up their lists this week of the PCI device IDs for the upcoming Polaris 12 hardware.

Not only is Emil Velikov prepping to release Mesa 13.0.6, but Mesa 17.0.2 is also right around the corner.

At the beginning of today, OpenGL threaded dispatch landed in Mesa as work that's existed in patch form for years but was recently revived for Mesa Git due to the potential for significant performance gains in select scenarios.