Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Landing Mesa 18.0, Enabling GLVND

Ubuntu developers are in the process of landing Mesa 18.0 within the "Bionic Beaver" archive for the upcoming 18.04 LTS distribution release. In the process they are also enabling GLVND for allowing the Mesa and NVIDIA proprietary drivers more happily co-exist on the same system.

Mesa 18.0 has a lot of new features as shared in our Mesa 18.0 feature overview. Right now it's up to the fourth release candidate, which is what is currently found in the Bionic archive, while the 18.0.x point release should ultimately be what's found in the stable release of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS come April. This 18.0-RC4 packaging was pulled in from Debian experimental. Mesa 18.1 will be released in April~May and thus too late for getting into Ubuntu 18.04, at least until the 18.04.2 point release down the road when it will carry the Ubuntu 18.10 graphics stack.

In the process of migrating to Mesa 18.0, Canonical has updated their out-of-tree Mir patches for Mesa. They are also now enabling the OpenGL Vendor Neutral Dispatch Library "GLVND" that allows multiple OpenGL drivers to happily co-exist on the same system.

The packages are currently in "Bionic proposed" archive as of yesterday with the Debian change-log here and libglvnd.

For the rest of the graphics stack, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS is going to ship with Linux 4.15 as mentioned for a while now. Ubuntu developers are also preparing an X.Org Server 1.19.7 release with xorg-server 1.20 sadly being out of reach for this Long Term Support release.