Mesa 18.2 Branched, Mesa 18.3 Enters Development

As expected, the Mesa 18.2 feature development is now over with the code having branched. Now open on Git master is Mesa 18.3-devel.

Mesa 18.2 is anticipated for release before the end of August assuming no major release blockers. The first release candidate of Mesa 18.2 should be out shortly and there should be a few more over the month of August.

Mesa 18.2 introduces many improvements and new features while a more complete feature overview will be published on Phoronix soon... Especially with a lot of last minute activity from the OpenGL ES 3.2 / ASTC bits to OpenGL 4.3 for VirGL arriving at the last minute.

Mesa 18.3 is now in development as what will turn into the Q4'2018 feature update for Mesa3D and should debut around December. It will be interesting to see what comes to the Mesa drivers in that time -- certainly more Vulkan driver work and hopefully in that time we'll see the OpenGL 4.6 support land for RadeonSI/i965. Also among the possibilities is the work Red Hat is pursuing on SPIR-V/compute for Nouveau.

Those wanting to test out Mesa 18.2 in its current debugging state can be found via the 18.2 branch while waiting on 18.2-RC1 to be created.