The Top Mesa News Of 2017

With 2017 slowly drawing to a close, here's a look back at the most-viewed Mesa news on Phoronix this year.

Year to date on Phoronix has been 345+ Mesa news articles with highlighting the advancements to Mesa that happen on a nearly daily basis. Mesa in 2017 has seen RADV become a conformant Vulkan driver, both RADV and ANV Vulkan drivers continuing to advance in-step with the latest upstream Vulkan revisions, RadeonSI has become much faster and competitive with NVIDIA on Linux, Vega support was timely for RadeonSI and RADV, Freedreno and VC4 continued advancing as great open-source ARM graphics drivers, and much more.

Of the 345+ Mesa articles to date, below is a look at the most viewed Mesa news this year:

Mesa 17.0.0 Officially Released
Mesa 17.0 is now officially available.

RADV Radeon Driver Is Now "Effectively" A Conformant Vulkan Implementation
The open-source Radeon Vulkan driver, RADV, has now passed another important milestone.

Trying Out The New OpenGL Threaded Dispatch In Mesa 17.1
At the beginning of today, OpenGL threaded dispatch landed in Mesa as work that's existed in patch form for years but was recently revived for Mesa Git due to the potential for significant performance gains in select scenarios.

Getting Better Radeon Polaris Performance On Ubuntu 17.04 With Mesa 17.1, Linux 4.11
While Ubuntu 17.04 is set to ship next month with Linux 4.10 and Mesa 17.0 as a big upgrade over the open-source graphics stack found in Ubuntu 16.10, if you switch over to using Mesa 17.1 and Linux 4.11 is the potential for even better performance. Here are some Radeon RX 470 tests in different combinations on Ubuntu 17.04.

Intel Haswell May Soon See Less Hangs With Mesa
If you are running Intel Haswell hardware with integrated graphics and have been seeing hangs under Linux, you're not alone but a fix is in the works.

A Lot Of The OpenGL Shader Cache Code Has Landed In Mesa
Timothy Arceri, who is now working for Valve (on the open-source AMD driver stack after leaving Collabora), has landed significant portions of his work built upon others for providing an on-disk shader cache within Mesa.

Mesa 17.0.1 Released With 60+ Fixes
Emil Velikov has announced the first point release to last month's big Mesa 17.0 release.

OpenGL Shader Cache Support For RadeonSI Is Making Progress
Last week we reported that Collabora developer Timothy Arceri would be trying to support Mesa's OpenGL shader cache with RadeonSI while since then work has begun to materialize.

Mesa 17.1 Expected In Early May, Feature Freeze In One Month
Collabora's Emil Velikov is continuing as the Mesa release manager and has laid out plans for getting the Mesa 3D 17.1 release to happen in early May.

Mesa's Shader Disk Cache Now Enabled By Default
With the recent roll-out of Mesa's on-disk shader cache, an initial limitation was that the entire cache would be erased if a user switched between 32-bit and 64-bit applications. That's now been fixed. And now the OpenGL GLSL shader cache is enabled by default.

Mesa 13.0.5 Is Coming In The Next Few Days
For those that haven't made the move yet to Mesa 17, Mesa 13.0.5 is going to be released in the next few days.

Mesa GL Threading Gets Flipped On For More Linux Games
The mesa_glthread functionality has now been whitelisted for more Linux games.

Tegra/Nouveau Render-Only Gallium3D Support
With the Etnaviv driver bringing the Gallium3D "renderonly" library to Mesa Git, Alexandre Courbot of NVIDIA has sent out an updated patch for adding renderonly support to Tegra/Nouveau.

RadeonSI On-Disk Shader Cache Lands In Mesa Git
Taking things further than the recent landing of the TGSI on-disk shader cache for this Gallium3D IR, Timothy Arceri at Valve has landed his support for a RadeonSI driver on-disk shader cache.

Marek Threads RadeonSI Gallium3D, Big Performance Gains For Many Games
Not to be confused with the recently-landed OpenGL threaded dispatch support that recently landed in Mesa Git, Marek Olšák has now published a set of patches for threading Gallium3D for RadeonSI: moving the execution of all Gallium3D pipe_context calls into a separate CPU thread.

Mesa Is Now Lighter By 58,000+ Lines Of Code
Waking up this morning, Mesa has been trimmed up by over 58,000 lines of code.

Samuel Pitoiset Takes To More RadeonSI/Mesa Optimizations
It was just yesterday that bindless texture support landed in Mesa Git for RadeonSI while now Samuel Pitoiset who works for Valve's Linux graphics driver team has taken to other work.

DRI3 Performance Tuning For VMware's VMWGFX Driver
Thomas Hellstrom of VMware has sent out a series of patches to correct the performance when DRI3 (Direct Rendering Infrastructure 3) is enabled for virtual drivers such as their VMWGFX Gallium3D driver.

Valve Planning To Carry Mesa GL Thread Feature On SteamOS, Per-Game Features
It's looking like Valve will begin carrying some out-of-tree patches for their Mesa packages they use on SteamOS.

61 New Patches Allow OpenGL 4.5 For Radeon RX Vega
Initial support for Radeon RX Vega support in Mesa landed for Mesa 17.1 at the end of March. However, this initial support was limited to OpenGL 3.1 while now patches have come to take Vega up to OpenGL 4.5.