Mesa News Archives

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.

The long-standing patches for implementing threaded OpenGL dispatch have landed in Mesa 17.1-devel Git.

Mesa release manager Emil Velikov is arranging to release Mesa 13.0.6 in the days ahead.

There were several interesting Git commits hitting Mesa 17.1-devel tonight.

Timothy Arceri at Valve is still working on the on-disk Mesa shader cache even though the GLSL/TGSI shader cache and RadeonSI binary caches have landed. In particular, his recent effort has been about improving the cold performance -- or when there isn't a shader cache present or it needs to be re-generated.

A patch is now available for enabling the GLSL/TGSI on-disk shader cache for the Nouveau Gallium3D driver.

Collabora's Emil Velikov is continuing as the Mesa release manager and has laid out plans for getting the Mesa 3D 17.1 release to happen in early May.

AMD developer Christian König has worked the 10-bit HEVC GPU-accelerated decoding into shape for the open-source RadeonSI Gallium3D driver.

One month ago AMD developer Marek Olsak sent out threaded OpenGL dispatch code for Mesa, which can be a big win for some games but unfortunately Marek is now too busy to handle the code. Fortunately, Collabora-turned-Valve developer Timothy Arceri has taken to getting this code vetted.

With the recent roll-out of Mesa's on-disk shader cache, an initial limitation was that the entire cache would be erased if a user switched between 32-bit and 64-bit applications. That's now been fixed. And now the OpenGL GLSL shader cache is enabled by default.

Emil Velikov has announced the first point release to last month's big Mesa 17.0 release.

Soft/emulated ARB_gpu_shader_fp64 support for GPUs not natively implementing double-precision/FP64 support is getting close in Mesa.

Taking things further than the recent landing of the TGSI on-disk shader cache for this Gallium3D IR, Timothy Arceri at Valve has landed his support for a RadeonSI driver on-disk shader cache.

Emil Velikov has announced the availability today of the Mesa 17.0.1 release candidate.

Thanks to the work done in part by Fedora, Arch Linux has enabled in testing support for the GLVND-enabled Mesa that can happily co-exist alongside the NVIDIA proprietary driver.

Last year there was a Google Summer of Code student working on a library to implement double-precision operations (FP64) in pure GLSL 1.30 as a benefit to older GPUs not having native FP64 capabilities. While that work didn't materialize as a solution in 2017 for those wanting "soft" ARB_gpu_shader_fp64 for being able to potentially expose OpenGL 4.0 on more R600g era GPUs, the work is ongoing.

Last December we wrote about work being done on fuzzing OpenGL shaders leading to wild differences with the work being done at the Imperial College London. While they were testing other drivers on different operating systems, they have now fired up tests of Mesa.

Timothy Arceri, who is now working for Valve on the open-source AMD Linux stack, has sent out the latest patches for wiring in Mesa's GLSL on-disk shader cache for R600g/RadeonSI drivers.

Emil Velikov announced the release today of Mesa 13.0.5.

For those that haven't made the move yet to Mesa 17, Mesa 13.0.5 is going to be released in the next few days.

Timothy Arceri, who is now working for Valve (on the open-source AMD driver stack after leaving Collabora), has landed significant portions of his work built upon others for providing an on-disk shader cache within Mesa.

While yesterday's Mesa 17.0 release took Intel Haswell hardware from OpenGL 3.3 to OpenGL 4.5, this quarterly update didn't end up bring the older Ivy Bridge hardware past OpenGL 3.3. But consulting firm Igalia has continued working on their patches to bring Ivy Bridge hardware up to OpenGL 4.0.

Last week Timothy Arceri posted TGSI shader cache patches for Mesa that so far benefit the R600g and RadeonSI Gallium3D drivers but could also help out the other Gallium3D drivers too. The second version of those patches have now been published.

While Mesa 17.0 was just released, new feature development continues building up for Mesa 17.1.

Mesa 17.0 is now officially available.

Vulkan is going on one year old and while the hardware driver support has continued to advance, we haven't yet seen a software implementation of Vulkan for running on a CPU. Of course, not for expecting any performance miracle or the like, but as a vendor-neutral platform for being able to test Vulkan's behavior, certain fallback scenarios, and other use-cases like Mesa's LLVMpipe/swrast/Softpipe software rasterizers.

In continuation of this morning's article about Valve Planning To Carry Mesa GL Thread Feature On SteamOS, Per-Game Features, it looks like the developers working for Valve on the open-source Linux graphics driver stack are looking to do more in the per-game profile space.

It's looking like Valve will begin carrying some out-of-tree patches for their Mesa packages they use on SteamOS.

Marek Olšák has posted a set of patches today to the Mesa mailing list and they should help some Linux games, at least Rocket League.

Mesa developer Thomas Helland is looking at reviving an old set of Mesa patches that could help out in some CPU-bound scenarios.

Marek Olšák volleyed the 26 patches needed for Mesa supporting threaded OpenGL dispatch onto the Mesa mailing list for some additional public review.

As a quick update to yesterday's article about RADV fast clears by default was being proposed, that change-over just happened in Mesa 17.1-devel Git.

Timothy Arceri of Collabora has sent out his latest patches to Mesa in regards to the ongoing work for shader caches. The 40 patches published over night do benefit RadeonSI and R600g.

Emil Velikov has kicked off the new release by announcing the third release candidate to the upcoming Mesa 17.0.

Four years ago Intel developers were working on a threaded OpenGL dispatch mechanism for Mesa, but it never ended up being merged. Now, prolific Mesa contributor and AMD developer Marek Olšák is looking to merge this code and clean it up.

When writing this week about ILO Gallium3D being dropped from mainline Mesa, a Phoronix reader asked if LunarGLASS would be the next thing to be removed from Mesa... But LunarGLASS never made it to mainline Mesa, though it still is in development.

Last week we reported that Collabora developer Timothy Arceri would be trying to support Mesa's OpenGL shader cache with RadeonSI while since then work has begun to materialize.

Waking up this morning, Mesa has been trimmed up by over 58,000 lines of code.

Mesa 13.0.4 was released today by Collabora's Emil Velikov while the Mesa 17.0 debut is still on track for later this month.

Eric Anholt continues working on the open-source VC4 graphics driver stack for adding additional features and improving the OpenGL performance of the Broadcom GPU on the Raspberry Pi.

While many Phoronix readers cringe when hearing "Imagination Tech" or "PowerVR" due to past Linux driver issues and the lack of a full-featured open-source driver, one of their developers is now requesting commit rights to Mesa.

Samuel Pitoiset, former Nouveau contributor who is now working for Valve on AMD open-source Linux driver optimizations, landed some improvements this morning in Mesa Git.

For older Intel i915~i945 graphics hardware, the Linux Mesa driver has exposed OpenGL 2.1 support while under Windows these ~12+ year old integrated graphics have only exposed OpenGL 1.4. Mesa now though might withdraw its OpenGL 2 support by default for older hardware on the i915 driver.

The RADV Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver has seen some code land in Mesa Git while other patches are being staged on Mesa-dev as January comes to an end.

The libdrm 2.4.75 library is now available as the important component sitting between the user-space drivers and the kernel DRM.

Within Mesa Git this morning is another feature flipped on for the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver: ARB_gpu_shader_int64.

The second release candidate is now available for the upcoming Mesa 17.0.

Timothy Arceri of Collabora is close to finally merging the massive OpenGL on-disk shader cache. A majority of that work is for common Mesa but for the initial work it's just been wired into Intel's i965 Mesa driver. But, fortunately, this Collabora developer is planning to wire up the GLSL shader cache for benefiting the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver.

Timothy Arceri of Collabora has updated the hardware agnostic portion of the on-disk shader cache patches.