Mesa will be backported unrenamed from Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS

Jan 30, 2017 02:31 GMT  ·  By

After announcing in December 2016 that Mesa 12.0.4 backport was available for testing on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, Canonical's Timo Aaltonen is now reporting on the upcoming availability of the Mesa 12.0.6, the last update in the series.

It would appear that Mesa 12.0.6 3D Graphics Library, which was announced last week by Collabora's Emil Velikov, has already hit the xenial-proposed and yakkety-proposed channels of the Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS (Xenial Xerus) and Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak) operating systems.

So if you have the proposed repository (pre-release updates) enabled on your Ubuntu PC, you could update to Mesa 12.0.6 right now by enabling proposed updates in Software & Updates. However, Mesa 12.0.6 being the last in the series, it's recommended that you move to the Mesa 13 branch from a stable third-party PPA, such as Padoka Stable Mesa.

Ubuntu 16.04 LTS users will get newer Mesa releases

With that in mind, and considering the fact that Canonical will release the second Ubuntu 16.04 LTS point release in only three days, it would appear that Xenial users will stick with Mesa 12.0.6 after all and not a recent Mesa 13 version as initially believed. But, it looks like users will get newer Mesa builds soon after the launch of Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS.

"Previous LTS point releases came with a renamed Mesa backported from the latest release (as in mesa-lts-wily for instance) . Among other issues this prevented providing newer Mesa backports for point-release users without getting a mess of different versions," said Timo Aaltonen in a recent blog post.

In related news, if you're using Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) for gaming and you have an older AMD Radeon graphics card from the Southern Islands (GNC 1.0) family, it's now possible to install the proprietary AMDGPU-PRO 16.60 video driver. More details can be found here.