Mesa News Archives

Earlier this month I wrote about much faster tessellation coming for AMD's RadeonSI Gallium3D driver and now that code has landed.

A slew of patches hit mainline Mesa over the night that take care of various OpenGL 4.x related work items.

New to the upcoming Mesa release is the OpenSWR software rasterizer developed by Intel and geared for faster performance, at least for the workloads of most interest to the Intel engineers working on this driver.

For those curious whether Mesa 11.3 improves the performance at all for users bound to an old AMD Radeon graphics card using the R600 Gallium3D driver, I have some tests of that to share this morning.

For those having some extra time today to help test out some new Mesa patches or just curious about what's on the horizon, Nicolai Hähnle of AMD has posted some Mesa state tracker patches for benefiting several modern Linux games.

Gallium3D's video acceleration code for VA-API VDPAU state tracker were upgraded today with support for DRI3.

This weekend was the ambitious proposal to delay Mesa 12.0 until there's OpenGL 4.5 support in this open-source driver stack, which could tack on around an extra month to the release schedule. It's now looking like this change in release planning will not happen.

There's traction building around delaying the next Mesa release, which is currently scheduled to be out in June and for a feature freeze in just a few days. A new proposal is to make Mesa 12.0 be the release with initial OpenGL 4.5 support.

Axel Davy who has been one of the prolific developers involved on the "Nine" Gallium3D state tracker for providing a basic Direct3D 9 implementation under Linux has sent in a set of 39 patches that he hopes to land in time for next month's Mesa release.

Yet another feature landing in Mesa Git ahead of the upcoming Mesa 11.3/12.0 branching for release next month is lossless compression in the Intel Mesa DRI driver.

There are new Mesa happenings in the OpenGL Vendor Neutral Dispatch Library (GLVND) space.

With perfect timing now that the Radeon DDX enables DRI3 by default, Leo Liu of AMD has posted patches for implementing DRI3 support within the VA-API and VDPAU Gallium3D components.

There is more exciting open-source AMD work to share today, a week before the feature freeze for the next version of Mesa.

Bas Nieuwenhuizen has announced his work on "offchip tessellation" support for the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver to provide dramatically better OpenGL tessellation performance.

Mesa release manager Emil Velikov of Collabora has announced the release of Mesa 11.2.2, the newest stable point release for this user-space stack to the open-source graphics drivers.

With the latest code landing in Mesa Git this afternoon, the GL_ARB_query_buffer_object has been wired up for Intel's i965 OpenGL driver.

Red Hat developer Rob Clark has put out a new update concerning the status of his pet project, Freedreno, for providing open-source, reverse-engineered graphics support for Qualcomm Adreno hardware.

Timothy Arceri of Collabora has been restoring work on an on-disk shader cache for Intel's open-source Mesa OpenGL driver that was originally started by some of the Intel OTC driver developers.

Going along with the work written about yesterday of Igalia Posts Intel vertex_attrib_64bit Mesa Driver Patches, Close To OpenGL 4.1+, the latest ARB_gpu_shader_fp64 patches were published today for the Intel i965 Mesa driver.

For x86 Android users, patches are available for making use of Mesa's LLVMpipe driver in Gallium3D for cases where hardware drivers are not available. This support is reportedly good enough for running Android apps in the absence of proper OpenGL drivers.

Mesa release manager Emil Velikov has laid out plans to release the next version of Mesa in just over one month.

It turns out that Skylake's HD Graphics 510, HD Graphics 535, Iris Graphics 550, and Iris Graphics P555 were missing their open-source driver support from an important piece of the Linux graphics stack.

Marek Olšák's latest big patch series has landed.

The AMD RadeonSI Gallium3D driver for GCN GPUs now has support for OpenGL Compute Shaders within the latest Mesa code!

Mesa 11.2.1 is now available as the first maintenance release for Mesa 11.2.

It seems more and more independent developers are interested in getting involved in Mesa open-source graphics driver development, but aren't really sure where to start or what are some easy tasks to get started.

For those that missed the notice, Intel's Vulkan driver will soon be merging into mainline Mesa.

Mesa release manager Emil Velikov at Collabora announced the release candidate today of the forthcoming Mesa 11.2.1.

For those anxious to see compute shaders for then having OpenGL 4.3 support by the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver for GCN GPUs, the latest patches have been published.

As the last update of the day from AMD RadeonSI Gallium3D Is Now Incredibly Close To OpenGL 4.3, things are looking great with RadeonSI soon hitting OpenGL 4.3 but today the latest commits have now verified the OpenGL 4.2 compliance.

There is another OpenGL 4.3 extension crossed off the TODO list of the AMD RadeonSI Gallium3D driver for GCN GPUs.

Back in December a patch rolled out for supporting ETC2 and ASTC texture compression by the Nouveau NVC0 Gallium3D driver. Today that patch was finally merged for benefiting newer NVIDIA GPUs.

Mesa 11.2 is arriving a month late, but it's now available this morning as the latest ~3 month update for the project. Mesa 11.2 does have many improvements, but it doesn't advance the OpenCL core support level for any of the prominent hardware drivers.

It seems we're currently pacing at a rate where almost each day there is new OpenGL 4.x or OpenGL ES 3.2 activity reaching Mesa Git master.

It's been over three weeks since Mesa 11.2 was supposed to have been released while 11.2.0 is now scheduled to make its debut on Friday.

For those making use of OpenGL and VDPAU together, there is better interoperability support within the Gallium3D VDPAU state tracker.

With Q1'16 quickly coming to a close, I ran some Git statistics on the Mesa repository this morning to see how things are ticking so far in 2016.

For anyone running applications or games still relying upon the GL_ATI_fragment_shader extension, this old OpenGL extension is now supported by all Gallium3D drivers.

Mesa's Gallium3D drivers are stepping closer to supporting the NIR intermediate representation as a tier-one IR.

Patches are out for yet another OpenGL 4 extension that may soon be supported by the Gallium3D drivers as another item to mark off the list for OpenGL 4.3.

Mesa 11.2 was supposed to be released in early March but that milestone has yet to be reached.

OpenSWR, the new high performance software rasterizer developed by Intel and leveraging LLVM within Mesa, saw a slew of commits today.

While AMD just open-sourced their next-gen Polaris graphics driver code this week, changes have already landed in LLVM and this morning the Mesa/Gallium3D modifications necessary have landed in mainline Mesa.

Shortly after the massive RadeonSI GL4 shader image work that landed yesterday, another OpenGL 4.3 extension was enabled in Mesa Git for all Gallium3D drivers.

Timothy Arceri of Collabora has posted another big patch series for implementing another part of OpenGL 4 within Mesa.

AMD's Nicolai Hähnle on Sunday posted another large Mesa patch series, this time more preparation work for shader images support within Gallium3D.

Besides Linux 4.5 expected this weekend, the release of Mesa 11.2 is also imminent.

Mesa 11.2.0-rc3 is now available via Git as the latest weekly test release to this upcoming major Mesa release.

Mesa has inched a tiny bit closer to supporting OpenGL 4.4 thanks to work done by Collabora's Timothy Arceri.

While the open-source Intel Mesa Linux graphics driver yet doesn't expose OpenGL 4.0 compliance for missing out on FP64 support, as written earlier this week, that code is about ready for its review and could land in Mesa soon. Once that's out of the way, Intel's Mesa driver is stomping very close to OpenGL 4.3 compliance and another GL 4.3 extension was enabled today.