Mesa News Archives

As of late there's been an increasing effort to get OpenGL ES 3.2 working for Mesa. Overnight, another OpenGL ES 3.2 extension was put in place.

The newly-opened Mesa 11.3-devel code-base already has support for another OpenGL ES 3.2 extension.

The first release candidate of Mesa 11.2 is now available and this also signifies the branching of 11.2 from Mesa Git master.

For those currently running Ubuntu 15.10 or other similar Linux distributions powered off Mesa 11.0, here are some performance benchmarks comparing that release to the about-to-be-branched Mesa 11.2.

It didn't take long after yesterday's Vulkan 1.0 release for a question to be asked whether there could be a Gallium3D Vulkan state tracker developed.

The latest version of the Mesa DRM library (Libdrm) is now available with a number of additions.

When running Valve's Dota 2 game on Linux and using the Linux 4.5 kernel and Mesa 11.2, the performance of the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver with Radeon and AMDGPU DRM drivers is performing remarkably well compared to the proprietary AMD Linux graphics driver.

Samuel Pitoiset began pushing his Gallium3D Mesa state tracker changes this morning for supporting compute shaders via the GL_ARB_compute_shader extension.

In the process of landing in the Ubuntu 16.04 "Xenial Xerus" package archive is the newly-minted Mesa 11.1.2. While a point release update for Ubuntu of Mesa isn't usually noteworthy, with this change they are also building against LLVM 3.8 to allow OpenGL 4.1 support for the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver.

Mesa 11.1.2 was released today as the latest bug-fix point release to Mesa 11.1.

David Airlie has been putting out some ARB_arrays_of_arrays patches this weekend for Mesa that implement this OpenGL 4.3 extension for all Gallium3D drivers supporting GLSL 1.30.

AMD's Marek Olšák has begun exploring an interoperability interface for OpenGL within Mesa and having a non-Mesa OpenCL implementation (not Clover OpenCL Gallium3D).

The race is on to see if any of the Mesa/Gallium3D hardware drivers (or core Mesa itself) will reach any new version levels for Mesa 11.2.

For those relying upon the "Nine" state tracker for Direct3D 9 support implemented for Gallium3D drivers in order to yield faster performance when running Windows games with Wine, you'll want to pull down the latest Mesa Git code.

While at first using open-source drivers to play XCOM 2 on Linux looked bleak, after some more trials, the latest Mesa Gallium3D code can work for Intel and Radeon.

Particularly after writing about OpenGL 4 progress in Mesa, it's quite common to see comments in our forums and elsewhere about people thinking when "Mesa is done" or how "OpenGL 4.5 is the last major release" or "Vulkan makes OpenGL dead", etc.

Mesa is now very close to OpenGL 4.3 compliance thanks to a massive patch series that was posted today for review.

Marek Olšák's latest Mesa patch series is hooking up support for the vendor-based OpenGL memory information reporting extensions to the Mesa and Gallium3D drivers.

Eduardo Lima of Igalia spoke this weekend at FOSDEM about the work done over the past year on switching the Mesa Intel i965 back-end to using the NIR intermediate representation.

The Nouveau NVC0 Gallium3D driver is very close to OpenGL 4.2 compliance as I wrote about this weekend and there's been other Gallium/NVC0 GL4 extension progress this weekend. The weekend is not over yet and Ilia Mirkin has already published another patch series...

Prolific Mesa contributor Ilia Mirkin has published a set of patches for hooking in shader image support within the Mesa state tracker, an important step particularly for OpenCL use-cases.

The Qualcomm Adreno 430 is now supported by the Freedreno Gallium3D driver.

Sixty-three patches were published on the Mesa mailing list this morning for wiring up the ARB_internalformat_query2 extension as needed by OpenGL 4.3.

AMD's Nicolai Hähnle has taken over where KDE developer Fredrik Höglund left off in working on accelerated texture uploads from Pixel Buffer Objects for Gallium3D drivers. This is a change just not for the Radeon Gallium3D drivers but for all of the drivers using the Mesa state tracker.

With yesterday's news about AMD planning GLVND support for their Linux driver -- which follows the NVIDIA 361 driver being the first to ship GLVND, years after NVIDIA began working on this OpenGL Vendor-Neutral Dispatch Library -- many have been wondering how Mesa fits into the equation.

More than a few times over the years various Linux users have come forward to profess their "new" idea for improving open-source Linux GPU driver performance: the CPU-based LLVMpipe should work in tandem with a graphics card's hardware driver to deliver better performance.

Christian König of AMD's open-source driver team landed some improvements this week into Gallium3D's video acceleration state tracker.

Emil Velikov announced the release this morning of Mesa 11.1.1 as the first big point release over Mesa 11.1.

Similar to yesterday's look at the Linux kernel Git code with its nearly 20.8 million lines, I also ran some Git statistics on Mesa to see how its development numbers panned out for the year.

Ilia Mirkin has seemingly not taken much time off from his Mesa hacking for the holidays. On Thursday this developer who most frequently works on the Nouveau and Freedreno drivers has published patches for better ARB_multi_draw_indirect handling.

For those fortunate enough to have a POWER8 system running Linux, the LLVMpipe software rasterizer should now be running faster.

This year Mesa made a heck of a lot of progress on advancing open-source 3D driver support for Linux and other operating systems. While Mesa isn't yet caught up with OpenGL 4.5, over the past twelve months there was a heck of a lot of progress made on OpenGL 4 support.

Mesa developer Jason Ekstrand has published a patch set today for providing real function support inside NIR, the new Mesa intermediate representation.

As an exciting early Christmas present for Intel Linux users, ARB_tessellation_shader support has landed in Mesa Git as needed by OpenGL 4!

For those that haven't moved onto the Mesa 11.1 series yet, Emil Velikov has announced the release of Mesa 11.0.8 that backports many fixes to this previous stable series.

Long-time open-source graphics driver contributor and one of the newer members of AMD's open-source driver team, Nicolai Hähnle, has written an insightful article about debugging GPU VM faults.

Emil Velikov has just released Mesa 11.1!

With the upcoming Linux 4.5 kernel cycle there's going to be open-source 3D acceleration for the Raspberry Pi via the VC4 DRM driver that was originally added for Linux 4.4

Open-source AMD Linux users who are habitual Mesa Git users will want to pull down the latest code.

Intel's Jorden Justen has landed the long in-progress ARB_compute_shader support inside Mesa. This compute shader support is available for Ivy Bridge "Gen 7" graphics and newer.

While Mesa 11.1 is right around the corner, Emil Velikov today announced the release of Mesa 11.0.7 as the latest collection of stable fixes.

Beyond all the recent kernel work with landing the initial Raspberry Pi KMS driver for the Linux 4.4 kernel, Eric Anholt at Broadcom has remained busy in user-space too with more improvements to the VC4 Gallium3D driver.

The third release candidate to Mesa 11.1 is now available for testing.

It's coming a few days late, but Mesa 11.1 Release Candidate 2 was officially released today.

Thanks to work by Red Hat's David Airlie, the R600 Gallium3D driver is very close to having OpenGL tessellation support, which will then allow this pre-GCN AMD open-source driver to expose OpenGL 4.1 compliance.

Mesa 11.1 is set to be released next month and while it won't advance the OpenGL 4 state for the Intel/Radeon/Nouveau drivers, there is a lot of other changes that have built up over the past quarter to get excited about for users of this open-source Linux graphics driver stack.

Given the fairly slow news day due to the holidays this week in the United States, here are some extra benchmarks to share this evening: some Mesa 11.0.2 vs. 11.2-devel Git benchmarks with an Intel Skylake system,

Our poll on Twitter this weekend was: Do you think Mesa will catch up to supporting the latest Khronos OpenGL specification (OpenGL 4.5+) next year?

A few months back Intel enabled ASTC texture compression support in their open-source drivers while Mesa's Gallium3D drivers have yet to see such treatment.

As a follow up to this morning's article about The Next Mesa Release Doesn't Have Any Major OpenGL Breakthrough, Mesa 11.1 has now been branched and the first release candidate has been sent off.