Mesa News Archives

Emil Velikov announced the Mesa 10.4.3 point release during the early hours of today. While most Mesa stable updates aren't too exciting, this one is certainly noteworthy if you're a user of the Gallium3D "Nine" state tracker for providing Direct3D 9 support on Linux.

Maarten Lankhorst of Canonical released the libdrm 2.4.59 library on Wednesday. While most libdrm updates tend not to be too exciting, the v2.4.59 release carries a bit more weight.

While there have been GLX_EXT_buffer_age patches for Mesa going back months, they've been for DRI3. Chris Wilson of Intel has now implemented GLX_EXT_buffer_age support along the DRI2 code-paths.

It was just last June that Eric Anholt left Intel for Broadcom to focus on creating the Broadcom VC4 open-source graphics driver stack for the Raspberry Pi to have a new DRM/KMS driver and a Gallium3D driver. In less than one year, he's made a lot of progress.

Intel developers are in the process of landing their GLSL shader cache into mainline Mesa.

NIR, the new IR for Mesa that's better than the status quo (GLSL IR), has finally landed inside mainline Mesa.

For those users relying upon stable Mesa point releases rather than Mesa Git master, kicking off this week are the release of Mesa 10.4.2 and Mesa 10.3.7.

Axel Davy has unleashed a big set of patches to improve the Gallium Nine state tracker that provides the experimental Direct3D 9.0 support on Linux.

For those getting back into Mesa/Gallium3D driver testing from Git following the holidays, Marek Olšák published another big set of patches this weekend.

Mesa 3D in 2014 saw slightly more commits this year than the previous two years. However, Mesa didn't see much in the way of new active contributors this year.

Emil Velikov has announced new point releases in the Mesa 10.3 and Mesa 10.4 series in getting ready new open-source graphics drivers for 2015.

Mesa made a heck of a lot of progress this year for advancing the state of open-source Linux graphics drivers.

The Freedreno Gallium3D driver's support for the Adreno A4xx hardware is taking shape and beginning to work for GL rendering on this latest-generation Qualcomm graphics hardware.

Posted to the Mesa mailing list this week was a set of 123 patches that reintroduces NIR as a new IR for Mesa.

Beyond the VC4 Gallium3D work yesterday landing in Mesa that led to this Raspberry Pi graphics driver potentially running much faster, DMA-BUF support was also added.

Eric Anholt, the lead developer developer behind the Broadcom VC4 Mesa/Gallium3D driver stack for supporting the Raspberry Pi, has announced a new performance achievement.

After a one day week delay due to older drivers/GPUs breaking on the newer Mesa code, Mesa 10.4 was officially released this Sunday morning.

With being early on in the Mesa 10.5 development cycle, Intel developers have gone ahead and merged their initial Skylake support branch into Mesa Git master.

The release of Mesa 10.4 is being dragged out by a few days due to a regression affecting older GPUs/drivers that causes this new Mesa version to be in bad shape. Hopefully by the end of this coming week though, Mesa 10.4.0 will be christened.

Last week I ran benchmarks showing Intel HD Graphics having some changes with Mesa 10.5-devel Git and improvements with the AMD Gallium3D drivers. Rounding out the Mesa Git master tests, here's some tests with the open-source NVIDIA graphics performance via Nouveau.

Mesa 10.4 is being released as soon as next week and continuing in usual tradition this new version brings a lot of exciting changes for users of the open-source Linux hardware graphics drivers.

Emil Velikov has released the third weekly release candidate to Mesa 10.4 that's expected to be officially released in December.

Emil Velikov has announced the first release candidate for the upcoming Mesa 10.4 release.

Those with Qualcomm Adreno A4xx series graphics hardware, the open-source 3D support is coming along nicely.

Mesa 10.4 was branched from Git master this weekend and that means the next Mesa release features only OpenGL 3.3 compliance and not OpenGL 4.0~4.2 as many had hoped.

For conservative users sticking to the Mesa 10.3.x stable series until Mesa 10.4 is christened in December, the 10.3.3 release is out. While there's many fixes, an overwhelming majority of them are related to Freedreno, the reverse-engineered Qualcomm Adreno graphics driver.

Marek Olšák this week volleyed a controversial proposal to effectively knock off the EGL state tracker for Gallium3D drivers.

Open-source developers have been working on pushing the Direct3D 9 state tracker into mainline Mesa that would allow patched copies of Wine to natively use this D3D9 support for speeding up the process of running various Windows games on Linux.

Kristian Høgsberg has published a new patch-set but it's not for Wayland, it's for the Intel Mesa driver.

While there hasn't been much to report on lately with regard to major OpenGL 4.x advancements, the OpenGL 4.0+ support is still being worked on by the open-source developers wishing to expose GL4 compliance within the Intel, Radeon, and Nouveau Linux graphics drivers, among other potential Mesa/Gallium3D drivers.

Timothy Arceri who previously crowd-funded work to add new GL extensions to Mesa and did so successfully multiple times has now written a new blog post on the topic of reducing the CPU usage in Mesa to potentially improve frame-rates.

For those living by stable Mesa releases rather than the exciting, bleeding-edge Mesa Git code for open-source Linux graphics drivers, Mesa 10.3.2 is available this Friday night.

The performance of the upcoming Mesa 10.4 might be better out-of-the-box for R600g and RadeonSI Gallium3D driver users if a new patch is accepted to re-enable HyperZ by default.

Emil Velikov, the new Mesa release manager, has issued a straw-man proposal to release Mesa 10.4 in early December.

It looks like we could see the Direct3D 9 (Gallium3D Nine) state tracker land within Mesa! This state tracker can be used for accelerating D3D9-using Windows games via Wine and other purposes. The Gallium3D Nine patches are called for review as of this Saturday morning with ambitions of being merged to master.

For users of Mesa stable releases rather than the exciting Git activity, there's some new releases worth upgrading to.

Matt Turner, an Intel OTC developer and long-time open-source graphics contributor, presented at XDC2014 Bordeaux about progress made with their GLSL compiler. Connor Abbott, fresh out of high school who was an Intel intern this summer, presented his work on the new "NIR" intermediate representation.

In addition to doing the xf86-video-freedreno 1.3.0 release this weekend, Rob Clark also took the opportunity to write a lengthy blog post on the progress made for the open-source, reverse-engineered Linux graphics driver stack for Qualcomm's Adreno graphics hardware. The few contributors involved have done a stunning job over the past few months to implement much of OpenGL 3 for this ARM graphics driver and make other improvements -- all without the support or backing of Qualcomm.

Last week I wrote about AMD working on a new VA-API state tracker for Gallium3D after the original VA-API support was dropped two years ago. That new state tracker has landed in mainline Mesa Git.

Years ago there was a VA-API state tracker within Gallium3D for offering drivers support for the Video Acceleration API. That implementation, however, was dropped back in 2012 as it was largely unmaintained and the VDPAU state tracker proved to be more popular. Now, however, it seems AMD is working to introduce a new VA-API implementation for Gallium3D.

A notable Mesa DRM library update was released today.

Yesterday I shared my initial Counter-Strike: Global Offensive benchmarks on Linux while following that have been others using the Phoronix Test Suite and OpenBenchmarking.org to deliver their own results for this latest Valve game to reach Linux.

For those with a Raspberry Pi, the emerging open-source 3D-supported Linux graphics driver stack continues to evolve.

Besides the Wayland 1.6 release and other exciting Linux news today, Mesa 10.3 is another exciting open-source milestone achieved today.

The out-of-tree Direct3D 9.0 state tracker for Mesa's Gallium3D continues to show much potential for allowing Wine-based games to better perform on Linux with the open-source Gallium3D drivers.

While Intel's Beignet project for providing open-source OpenCL support for their hardware on Linux was widely criticized upon its debut for being a new project rather than basing the work on Gallium3D's "Clover" OpenCL state tracker, Beignet has matured much more quickly and for now at least seems to be better off than the Gallium3D OpenCL support.

The latest high profile work by prolific Nouveau contributor Ilia Mirkin is the landing of GL_ARB_texture_view for the NV50 and NVC0 Gallium3D drivers.

While Ubuntu 14.10 is finally getting X.Org Server 1.16, it doesn't yet have Mesa 10.3 but that can be easily addressed via third-party packages.

For users of the unofficial Intel Gallium3D driver, ILO, it's been updated with some minor improvements.

Here's some numbers on how Mesa 3D development has been pacing the past few months.