Mesa 18.0 Has Been Off The Tracks For More Than One Month

Written by Michael Larabel in Mesa on 13 March 2018 at 07:01 PM EDT. 11 Comments
MESA
Mesa 18.0 had been due for release around mid-February, but that didn't happen and there hasn't even been a release candidate in more than one month.

Mesa 18.0-RC4 was released back on 9 February and since then there hasn't been an RC5 or a new release.

From the 18.0 Git branch there has been just one fix landing since RC4, that is for not exposing ARB_get_program_binary formats for the Intel driver when running with an OpenGL compatibility profile.

Asking about the state of Mesa 18.0 as of last week have sadly gone unanswered. This comes while the previous release stream, Mesa 17.3, was their buggiest release branch in quite a while. Developers are now discussing how to improve the release process to drive more quality releases.

There has been some talk in the forums that Mesa 18.0 was supposedly halted in favor of getting a release out with the Intel ANV / Radeon RADV Vulkan 1.1 support, but none of the Vulkan 1.1 patches living in Mesa Git master have yet to be backported to the 18.0 branch to back up that claim.

Anyhow, we'll see what comes of the Mesa 18.0 release and it's certainly not the first time there has been a multi-week period of Mesa RCs going silent. But the longer it takes Mesa 18.0 to get out the door, users sticking to stable are still with a dated Mesa 17.3 series and the Mesa 18.1-devel improvements continue coming in hot and fast for next quarter.
Related News
About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

Popular News This Week