Some more exciting last minute work landing in Mesa Git before this weekend's Mesa 17.0 branching are the potentially performance-improving HiZ work within the Intel Vulkan driver.
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2,391 Mesa open-source and Linux related news articles on Phoronix since 2006.
In time for this weekend's feature freeze of Mesa 17.0, the Etnaviv Gallium3D driver has landed in Mesa Git after years of work on this reverse-engineered, open-source driver stack.
It should be a busy end of week for Mesa with the Mesa 17.0 feature freeze being this weekend. In addition to Haswell hitting OpenGL 4.2, Nouveau's NVC0 Gallium3D driver has enabled OpenGL 4.3 support for newer Maxwell and Pascal hardware.
Days ago we mentioned the patches were lining up to get Intel's Haswell to OpenGL 4.2 and this morning those patches have landed in Mesa Git ahead of the branching for the Mesa 17.0 release.
While a lot of OpenGL improvements, Vulkan driver advancements, and performance optimizations can be found in Mesa Git for the forthcoming release as Mesa 17.0, one big feature that's still missing as of today is the OpenGL on-disk shader cache.
In addition to Mesa's "ANV" Intel Vulkan driver getting Float64 shader support this week, another important addition has made it into the latest Mesa Git code.
There was talk last year of Mesa moving to a date-based version scheme and that's now official with Mesa in Git being 17.0-devel rather than 13.1-devel.
Emil Velikov of Collabora has announced the first stable Mesa release of 2017.
Broadcom developer Eric Anholt has issued his first weekly progress report of the new year for the VC4 open-source graphics driver supported by the Raspberry Pi.
A developer has published a set of 14 patches providing copy propagation optimizations for Mesa's GLSL/Nir code.
Unless Marek delivers another one of his big patch-sets to provide some new feature/improvement to RadeonSI, the OpenGL shader cache magically lands, or some other big surprise to end out the year, here are some final statistics about Mesa's impressive developments in 2017.
Broadcom developer Eric Anholt pushed a few VC4 Gallium3D commits into mainline Mesa tonight, likely marking the end of work on this open-source Raspberry Pi 3D driver for 2016.
Almost any longtime Linux user or Phoronix reader will surely agree with me that Mesa absolutely rocked this year for the open-source graphics stack.
Red Hat developer Dave Airlie spent some of his Christmas committing some fixes to the open-source RADV Radeon Vulkan driver for benefiting id Software's DOOM game with Vulkan renderer.
Etnaviv project member Christian Gmeiner has sent out the updated patches implementing the Gallium3D driver for Vivante GPU cores.
NVIDIA Linux developer Thierry Reding has posted some Mesa patches this Christmas weekend.
It appears that ARB_gpu_shader_fp64 for Intel Haswell graphics hardware might finally be merged soon into Mesa and thereby exposing OpenGL 4.0 support.
A huge series of patches landed in Mesa Git today for benefiting the Gallium3D Nine state tracker for Direct3D 9 support on Linux.
It's not as exciting as seeing a massive patch series arrive for like the OpenGL shader cache or other key features, but Collabora's Timothy Arceri sent out a set of 70 patches today providing some clean-ups and bug fixes for Mesa.
While it took a long time for Intel's Mesa driver to begin supporting the ARB_gpu_shader_fp64 extension for double-precision floating-point data types in shaders, fortunately it looks like Intel should soon land the Float64 support in their Vulkan driver soon.
While Intel's at OpenGL 4.5 compliance in Mesa with their open-source graphics driver, there remain a number of modern extensions that aren't currently mandated by an OpenGL version number, among them is ARB_transform_feedback_overflow_query.
A nine-year-old Mesa bug has now been squashed by Marek Olšák. This Mesa bug ended up affecting the RadeonSI driver and causing stability issues, which has now been addressed and should help open-source AMD Linux gamers run titles like Team Fortress 2 and Batman Arkham: Origins (Wine).
While it was disappointing that Fedora 25 shipped with Mesa 12.0, the Mesa 13.0 version has now been sent down as a stable release update.
Prolific Gallium Nine developer Axel Davy has published a massive patch-set today implementing support for internal multi-threading in this Direct3D 9 state tracker.
Mesa developers are discussing the idea of removing the Intel "ILO" Gallium3D driver from Mesa since it hasn't been maintained in a while and provides only limited functionality.
Mesa release manager Emil Velikov announced the availability today of Mesa 12.0.5, just another point release and what he expects will be the last of the Mesa 12.0.x releases.
Earlier this week I wrote about a release schedule coming out for Mesa 13.1 that culminates with this next big Mesa update being out in February. Some Mesa developers have now shared the work they still hope to see in this next release.
Rob Clark has landed his code for supporting EGL_ANDROID_native_fence_sync in Mesa and his Freedreno Gallium3D driver is the first in-tree Mesa/Gallium3D driver to support the native fence FD support, even beating out the Intel driver.
Mesa release manager Emil Velikov has laid out his draft of a release schedule for the next major Mesa release.
Fresh from the libdrm 2.4.74 release that had some Etnaviv API changes, the Etnaviv Gallium3D driver has been proposed for mainline Mesa as the open-source, reverse-engineered 3D effort for Vivante graphics cores.
Mesa DRM library updates aren't usually too notable, but that's different with this evening's libdrm 2.4.74 release.
Last week marked the release of libSoftFloat 1.0, the library working to implement double-precision operations in pure GLSL 1.30 via bit twiddling operations and integer math. This is the most hopeful effort yet for getting OpenGL FP64 support exposed for older GPUs that lack native support.
Eric Anholt at Broadcom has been focusing his latest VC4 driver efforts on performance tuning.
In addition to the big Mesa shader cache patch series hitting the mailing list over night, Ian Romanick at Intel sent out another big patch series: his revised work on ARB_gpu_shader_int64 support.
Timothy Arceri of Collabora has now revised the massive patch-set implementing an on-disk shader cache for Mesa with the work nearing completion, at least for the Intel i965 driver.
For those riding the stable Mesa release train, Mesa 13.0.2 is now available as the newest Mesa 13.0 point release.
While we have been talking a lot lately about performance optimizations and improvements to Intel's "ANV" Vulkan Linux driver, not all focus has been lost on the i965 Mesa OpenGL driver. In fact, a lot of code landed on Friday for i965.
For those riding the Mesa 13.0 stable release train rather than the adventurous Mesa 13.1-dev Git code, the Mesa 13.0.2 stable update is right around the corner with many fixes.
While AMD hasn't been doing much work lately on the Clover-based OpenCL support with focusing their open-source OpenCL efforts around ROCm / Radeon Open eCosystem, Edward O'Callaghan has been working on some much-needed love for the Clover OpenCL Gallium3D state tracker.
AMD developer Marek Olšák pushed his latest RadeonSI Gallium3D patch series into Mesa Git a few hours ago for further improving the open-source Radeon OpenGL driver stack.
Rob Clark on Friday sent out the patches for implementing the EGL_ANDROID_native_fence_sync extension within Mesa's EGL and Gallium3D code.
With Mesa drivers this year really improving a lot and reaching OpenGL ~4.5 compatibility for most drivers as well as the Intel and RADV Vulkan drivers getting into shape, they are becoming usable for day-to-day Linux gamers. While not all new Feral Linux game releases work with the Mesa drivers, a growing number of their games work well on Mesa 13.0+, and as such they are hoping Ubuntu will adopt a policy of making it easier to switch to newer Mesa releases.
Mesa 3D founder Brian Paul has added a relatively simple but useful improvement to core Mesa for dumping more debugging and performance information.
While there were initially concerns by users over OpenGL 4.4~4.5 support being exposed for open-source Mesa drivers due to the Khronos OpenGL conformance test suite for these newer versions and the associated costs, those concerns were laid to rest and the X.Org Foundation is moving ahead with becoming an official Khronos adopter for Mesa.
Ilia Mirkin, the prolific independent contributor to Mesa who started off on improvements to the Nouveau open-source NVIDIA driver a few years ago and has also contributed to Freedreno, has now turned to Intel's SWR Gallium3D software rasterizer as his latest target.
Mesa 13.0.1 is now available as the first point release to the massive Mesa 13.0 that brought OpenGL 4.5 to Intel, the RADV Radeon Vulkan driver, and much more.
The VC4 open-source graphics driver stack for notably supporting the Raspberry Pi Broadcom SoCs is nearing support for threading as another potential performance win.
For those that wait for the first point release to a new Mesa stable series before switching over to the latest open-source graphics driver stack, Mesa 13.0.1 is just around the corner.
For those sticking to the Mesa 12.0 stable series until the huge Mesa 13.0 has further stabilized, Mesa 12.0.4 is now available as the latest point release.
Mesa Git continues to be an exciting place to live for open-source GPU driver fans.
2391 Mesa news articles published on Phoronix.