Mesa 18.0 Is Now Primed For Releasing Soon

Mesa 18.0's delay of more than one month and without any new release candidate came while the open-source Intel developers were hunkered down to clear the remaining blocker bugs.

Fortunately, it appears the remaining Mesa 18.0 blocker bugs are now resolved, meaning the official release could come in a matter of days depending if they decide to first do a Mesa 18.0-rc5 release for last minute testing.

Longtime open-source Intel developer Kenneth Graunke announced a short time ago, "I think we've closed the last of the Mesa 18.0 blocker bugs. It looks like there are some patches nominated for the 18.0 branch still (fixing some of those issues), but assuming things are merged, I think we're ready to release. I checked with Mark and Jason on IRC and they seemed fine with shipping."

The recent 18.0 blockers included The recent blocker bugs involved dEQP test failures, a WebGL 2 shader crashing the Intel driver, and other regressions.

The 18.0 Git branch as of writing hasn't seen any new patches since 23 February, but hopefully the lingering patches for stable will get landed and we'll still end up seeing the Mesa 18.0 release this quarter.

This first major Mesa release of 2018 is coming with a lot of new functionality as outlined in our Mesa 18.0 feature overview.