AMD's Marek Olšák Is Dominating Mesa Open-Source GPU Driver Development This Year

With Q3 coming towards an end, here is a fresh look at the Mesa Git development trends for the year-to-date. Mesa on a commit basis is significantly lower than in previous years, but there is a new top contributor to Mesa.

Mesa as of today is made up of 6,101 files that comprise of 2,492,887 lines of code. Yep, soon it will break 2.5 million lines. There have been 104,754 commits to Mesa from roughly 900 authors.

When it comes to the most active Mesa developers this year, AMD's Marek Olšák is leading the path with being responsible for roughly 10% of the commits to Mesa this year. For as significant as Marek's contributions have been to Mesa over the past number of years, he's never been the number one author in any given year. The previous three years saw the most commits from Intel's Jason Ekstrand who has been leading their ANV Vulkan driver development.

Ekstrand is currently in second for most contributions so far this year followed by Samuel Pitoiset (Valve), Eric Anholt (Broadcom), Timothy Arceri (Valve), and Brian Paul (VMware, Mesa founder). There have been 194 authors so far this year which is roughly in line with previous years of around 200.

In fact, Marek's contributions are so great over the years that he has now reached the point of being the second biggest contributor to Mesa in its history -- coming in second just behind Mesa3D founder Brian Paul. Before Marek joined AMD several years back, he spent prior years prolifically contributing to the Radeon R300g and R600g drivers as a student.

While Intel, AMD, VMware, and Valve contribute a lot to Mesa3D development.. On a commit basis, this year it's trending significantly lower.

Year-to-date, Mesa has seen 5,242 commits, which is roughly half of what accumulated in the previous two years. With just over three months to go to end out the year, it looks like Mesa might see only about as many commits as it did back in 2014. But then again Mesa is now in much better shape over the past two years than it's ever been.

On a line count, Mesa for 2018 also is trending lower at so far only seeing 264k lines of new code (and 122k deletions) where as the previous two years it saw roughly a half million lines of new code each year and around 250k deletions.

Those enjoying numbers like I can dig through these latest Mesa development statistics here.