Mesa News Archives

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.

Mesa won't end out 2015 with reaching any new OpenGL support level, at least as far as Mesa in released form is concerned.

Mesa 11.0.6 was released this morning as the latest stable, bug-fix release for this important open-source 3D driver component to the Linux desktop.

Ian Romanick has landed support for the GL_EXT_shader_samples_identical extension within Mesa. This is a new OpenGL extension worked on by this member of Intel's Open-Source Technology Center team.

The Freedreno Gallium3D driver as the community-based, open-source 3D driver for Qualcomm Adreno graphics hardware will have OpenGL 3.1 support with the upcoming Mesa 11.1 release.

A few improvements for handling Direct Rendering Infrastructure 3 (DRI3) have landed in Mesa's Git code-base.

Mesa 11.0.5 was released this morning as the newest stable version of this critical open-source user-space 3D graphics library.

Thanks to work done by AMD, the Gallium3D "OMX" OpenMAX state tracker will now support headless operation for video decoding/encoding/transcoding.

The latest Nouveau Gallium3D driver work enables compute support for GeForce GTX 400/500 "Fermi" graphics cards.

Prolific Mesa contributor Ilia Mirkin has taken initial steps towards working on parallel shader compiles in Mesa.

As there's been some discussion lately about the "size" of the different open-source Linux graphics drivers, here are some fresh looks at the rough code size of each of the main DRM/KMS kernel drivers as well as the Mesa/Gallium3D user-space drivers.

Over a few commits yesterday, the Intel Mesa driver now exposes ARB_shader_clock support.

Martin Peres at Intel has sent out the latest revised patches for supporting Direct Rendering Infrastructure 3 (DRI3) with EGL.

Earlier this year Samsung's Julien Isorce posted VA-API support for Nouveau to better video acceleration for this open-source NVIDIA driver. Since then he's been working on some Gallium3D VA improvements to benefit the use-case of Chromium's GStreamer back-end.

With last week's release of Ubuntu 15.10, Mesa 11.0 is part of the open-source graphics stack. Unfortunate for those with an AMD GCN GPU that uses the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver, Mesa 11.0 on Ubuntu 15.10 is built against an older version of LLVM that doesn't allow the OpenGL 4.1 support to be exposed. For RadeonSI users, I'd say switching to Mesa 11.1-devel + LLVM 3.8 SVN is almost a must once installing Ubuntu 15.10, but is it worthwhile for R600g users?

A number of prominent changes have landed within Mesa in the past few days. If you haven't updated to the latest Git lately, here's some of what you're missing out on.

For those not riding Mesa Git master for all of the latest open-source 3D driver functionality, Mesa 11.0.4 is now the latest stable release.

The open-souce QEMU/KVM stack with VirtIO will finally be able to have guest 3D/OpenGL acceleration that's backed by the GPU/driver of the host system! While VMware and VirtualBox have long had guest 3D support backed by the host's hardware, it's taken a while for the open-source Linux virtualization stack to gain this functionality.

The latest OpenGL extension implemented for the Intel Mesa DRI driver is ARB_shader_stencil_export.

While Mesa currently has the swrast, LLVMpipe, and Softpipe drivers as software rasterizers that run OpenGL on the CPU rather than any dedicated GPU, a team at Intel has been developing a new, high-performance software rasterizer. This Intel team hopes to upstream their new "OpenSWR" project into Mesa as offering fast, CPU-rendered graphics.

Rob Clark has published a set of eight patches for review that add support for NIR as an alternate intermediate representation (IR) under Gallium3D.

While the Intel, Nouveau NV50/NVC0, and LLVMpipe/Softpipe drivers have already supported OpenGL 4.3's ARB_texture_view extension, the AMD R600g and RadeonSI drivers have not. However, that's looking to soon change.

For those that don't know or may have forgot, Gallium3D has a Heads-Up Display (HUD) for showing various driver metrics while running OpenGL games/applications. If you're an SVGA VMware user, there's some new HUD queries available.

While most Phoronix readers should be well aware of the bug reporting procedures for Mesa drivers, Ian Romanick of Intel has written a lengthy blog post about the process of writing a "good" bug report for the open-source graphics drivers.

Two years after starting work on the Arrays of Arrays support via crowd-funding, Timothy Arceri pushed a bulk of the work into mainline Mesa.

While Ubuntu 15.10 has Mesa 11.0 and it provides OpenGL 4 support for the Nouveau driver, it doesn't for RadeonSI. The issue is that in Ubuntu 15.10 is still an older version of LLVM that in the AMDGPU LLVM back-end lacks the needed support for OpenGL 4.0/4.1 compliance. Fortunately, a PPA has been updated for Ubuntu Wily with said support.

Landing tonight within Mesa Git master is ARB_gpu_shader5 support in the Radeon R600g driver.

Bas Nieuwenhuizen has been working on enabling Delta Color Compression (DCC) support for newer AMD Volcanic Islands (VI) GPUs within the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver.

Emil Velikov released the latest Mesa 11.0 point release on Saturday.

Timothy Arceri is the independent developer that started out doing some crowd-funded Mesa OpenGL extension development that was successful so he did a second crowd-funding campaign to do more Mesa feature work. That second extension, ARB_arrays_of_arrays, finally appears nearly complete so he's decided to work on another extension.

The OpenGL EXT_polygon_offset_clamp extension has been supported in mainline Mesa for the Intel i965 Mesa DRI driver for some time while now this extension is supported for older Intel Gen 4/5 hardware.

As of a change yesterday to Intel's i965 Mesa driver, the Vec4 back-end is unconditionally using NIR rather than GLSL IR with the option being removed.

Emil Velikov announced Mesa 10.6.9 today as the newest point release for the aging Mesa 10.6 series.

Mesa's Gallium3D "Clover" state tracker still lacks full OpenCL 1.2 support, but as of yesterday the CL 1.2's clCreateImage() function was hooked up.

For those not courageous enough to be riding Mesa Git for the very latest open-source graphics driver features, Mesa 11.0.1 was released this morning as the latest stable build.

Mesa 11.0 has landed within Ubuntu 15.10 for providing the latest open-source graphics drivers, primarily with exciting updates for the Intel, Radeon, and DRM drivers.

For those that haven't yet moved to Mesa 11.0 and aren't riding on Mesa 11.1-devel Git, Mesa 10.6.8 is now the next best thing.

Prolific Mesa contributor and AMD open-source developer, Marek Olšák, talked about handling shader recompiles in the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver.

With the latest-generation graphics on Skylake processors, open-source Intel developers are working right now to expose 16x multi-sample anti-aliasing (MSAA) inside the Linux Mesa driver.

Alejandro Piñeiro and others at Igalia have been working on adding a NIR to Vec4 pass to the Intel i965 driver back-end along with making other optimizations around NIR, the new intermediate representation for Mesa to replace GLSL IR.

For those riding Mesa Git master rather than the newly-released Mesa 11.0, there's now FP64 support in the R600 Gallium3D driver for select GPUs.

While Mesa developers are still working towards OpenGL ES 3.1 support, they also have to start thinking about their jobs ahead with supporting the latest OpenGL ES 3.2 specification.

Mesa 11.0 has been officially released this morning! Mesa 11.0 is a huge, unbelievable upgrade for open-source graphics drivers.

Ilia Mirkin, the independent developer known for his contributions to the open-source Nouveau and Freedreno graphics drivers, has implemented another OpenGL 4.5 extension in core Mesa and exposed it for the Intel i965 graphics driver.

The third release candidate to Mesa 11.0 is now available.

While most everyone would agree Mesa could benefit from more developers of this important piece of the open-source Linux desktop stack for providing OpenGL/3D graphics drivers, it seems slow patch review times are frustrating at least some casual developers wanting to contribute.

The latest Mesa 10.6 point release is now available for those sticking to stable updates until the official release of Mesa 11.0 in a week or so.

With the upcoming Mesa 11.0 release there is OpenGL 4.1 support on the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver for Radeon HD 7000 series and newer, but no OpenGL 4.0/4.1 support for the R600g driver, which was disappointing to some R600g users within our forums.

The second release candidate to Mesa 11.0 is now available for testing.

I'm in the process of doing several interesting Mesa 11.0 tests with different GPUs as well as using the latest LLVM and Linux kernel code.