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.
18 November 2016 - Feral Mesa Ubuntu - 59 Comments
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.
Collabora employee and Mesa release manager Emil Velikov has announced the availability of Mesa 13.0-RC3 and he expects to do the final Mesa 13 release in a matter of hours.
Expert Mesa developer Marek Olšák at AMD is spending this weekend hacking on some new OpenGL threading code to benefit the open-source Radeon Linux driver stack.
30 October 2016 - Radeon GL Threading - 40 Comments
In addition to RadeonSI re-enabling SDMA for Carrizo and Sea Islands GPUs yesterday, Marek Olšák made another change to fix the issue of random GPU hangs happening with Hawaii and Fiji graphics processors.
While Mesa 13.0 is coming along for release next month with exciting features like OpenGL 4.5 for Intel, unofficial GL 4.4/4.5 for RadeonSI/NVC0, and the addition of the RADV Radeon Vulkan driver, there is some functionality that sadly won't be found in this release.
Now that release manager Emil Velikov has worked through his LLVM issue, Mesa 13.0 Release Candidate 1 is now officially available as the first development release that has core OpenGL 4.4/4.5 support in Mesa.
The Mesa 12.1/13.0 release dragged out a bit to allow the RADV Radeon Vulkan driver to be merged and then some Gallium3D Nine fixes, which have landed. The branching / feature freeze didn't happen last week though as planned, but Emil Velikov the release manager has now provided an update.
Stemming from an issue of slow performance inside LXDE's file manager, the Raspberry Pi VC4 Gallium3D driver has received an optimization for better texture upload performance.
Earlier this week was a discovery of a "serious performance fix" For the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver by disabling ReZ. That change landed in Mesa Git already so I ran some before/after benchmarks.
Chad Versace, the Intel OTC developer turned Googler who is part of the Chrome OS driver team, has been baking the EGL_MESA_platform_surfaceless extension and its implementation inside Mesa.
15 October 2016 - EGL_MESA_platform_surfaceless - 1 Comment
Mesa 3D development has been exciting this year with seeing OpenGL 4.3 support in Mesa 12.0 and the next Mesa release having OpenGL 4.4 and 4.5 support (pending the passing of the Khronos CTS conformance), which has meant a lot of new code going into Mesa. Aside from modernizing the OpenGL 4.x support by these open-source drivers, there's been the addition of the Intel and Radeon Vulkan drivers and much more.
With the Mesa 13.0 feature freeze expected to happen before the weekend, it's been another exciting day in the Git development tree of landing last-minute features for next month's Mesa release.
The work by Nicolai Hähnle on finishing up the GL_ARB_enhanced_layouts extension for Gallium3D is now in Git. This officially marks RadeonSI done with OpenGL 4.4 and is effectively done with OpenGL 4.5 although the new version string is yet to be advertised.
Now that the RADV Radeon Vulkan driver is part of mainline Mesa, it's increasingly easy to experiment with this unofficial, open-source Vulkan driver on rolling-release distributions and through third-party package archives/repositories.
Chad Versace, the former Intel OTC developer now employed by Google on the Chromium team, has published the latest patches for implementing the EGL_ANDROID_native_fence_sync extension within Mesa's Intel driver.
11 October 2016 - EGL_ANDROID_native_fence_sync - Add A Comment
The 75 patches for Gallium3D's Nine state tracker improvements (D3D9) have now landed in Mesa Git master ahead of the branching for the next Mesa release at the end of the week.
11 October 2016 - Direct3D 9 State Tracker - 11 Comments
Iago Toral Quiroga of Igalia has sent out the second version of his massive 103 patches for implementing FP64 support for Intel Haswell hardware within the i965 Mesa driver in order to expose OpenGL 4.0 support.
With catching up on the OpenGL extensions, Marek Olšák of AMD has been spending a fair amount of time on performance optimizations for the AMD's open-source OpenGL driver and some code that benefits Mesa as a whole too. One of his latest patch series is on optimizing Mesa's GLSL compiler performance.
Building off the exciting patches published Friday for completing ARB_enhanced_layouts that finish off the RadeonSI OpenGL 4.4~4.5 support, the Nouveau NVC0 support is basically done too with the finishing up of that final extension being done in the Mesa state tracker.
We've been expecting many last minute Gallium3D Nine / D3D9 patches ahead of the Mesa 13.0 branching and yesterday the bulk of those patches were sent out.
On top of the RADV Vulkan driver being queued for the next Mesa release, it looks like some improvements to the "Nine" Direct3D 9 Gallium3D state tracker are also en route for the new Mesa version.
Following the mailing list talk over the past two days about doing the next Mesa release, plans are being discussed for releasing at the end of October and it might have just got a whole lot more exciting.
30 September 2016 - Next Mesa Release - 10 Comments
Marek Olšák is looking at using the jemalloc memory allocator for faster GLSL compilation and ultimately could redirect all malloc/calloc/realloc/free calls in Mesa to using jemalloc.
AMD developer Marek Olšák initiated the discussion about calling for the next Mesa release to succeed version 12.0. Regardless, it's looking like it will be another release off their three-month cadence.
29 September 2016 - Next Mesa Version - 2 Comments
Landing over night in Mesa Git is support for the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver with the ARB_query_buffer_object extension. Now on Mesa Git that means there is just one extension away before this AMD GCN OpenGL driver supports the 4.4 specification.
Just a few days ago was the fifth version of the proposed Mesa on-disk shader cache and it's looking like it may finally be ready for merging with some of the prep infrastructure work having landed today in mainline Mesa.
27 September 2016 - Mesa On-Disk Cache - 19 Comments
Intel's Mesa driver has supported all of the extensions required by the OpenGL ES 3.2 specification, but only today is the support being officially advertised.
For those craving some fresh Mesa Git benchmarks, here are a few OpenGL tests I carried out with some AMD Radeon GPUs when comparing the out-of-the-box Ubuntu 16.04 LTS performance to what's offered currently by Linux 4.8 and Mesa 12.1-dev Git.
The libdrm support was merged this weekend for Etnaviv, the open-source, reverse-engineered support around Vivante graphics cores. With the libdrm support in mainline, merging the Gallium3D driver into Mesa shouldn't be far behind.
18 September 2016 - Vivante Open-Source - 3 Comments
For those looking to live on the edge of Mesa development, there are some new patch series out this morning, particularly of interest if you are using the AMD RadeonSI Gallium3D driver for GCN GPUs.
Jon Turney has landed his big "Windows-DRI" patch-set in Mesa for improving the support when running GLX applications under under Cygwin. The patches provide direct-to-native-OpenGL for GLX clients running on Cygwin.
