14 DAY TRIAL // The first day of April kicks off with the release of the third maintenance update to the latest Mesa 17 graphics stack for Linux-based operating systems, as announced by Andres Gomez from the Mesa 3D Graphics Library project.
Mesa 17.0.3 is now the most advanced stable Mesa version, and it promises to bring various improvements for many of the included open source graphics drivers, such as both the Intel OpenGL and ANV Vulkan ones, RadeonSI, Galleon, Nouveau, Freedreno, as well as Radeon RADV Vulkan. It also improves the GLSL compiler.
"In this release we have several patches addressing improvements in the API validation and the GLSL compiler. Some other bunch of patches for the Intel drivers (both GL and Vulkan), including a fix for a hang with GfxBench 4.0 CarChase, several improvements in the Vulkan driver and other crash fixes," reads the mailing list announcement.
LLVM 5.0 and MSVC build fixes included
For the RadeonSI driver, the Mesa 17.0.3 maintenance release adds a Polaris12 PCI ID and a fix for a hang that occurred when a shader failed to compile. The Galleon drivers received a fix for an existing deadlock, and there are a bunch of improvements for the Radeon RADV Vulkan and Freedreno drivers too.
A series of performance improvements landed for the Nouveau driver, specifically for several of the games ported to the Linux and SteamOS platforms by Feral Interactive. Mesa 17.0.3 also comes with fixes for the Clover state tracker, as well as the SWR software rasterizer, which should now compile with LLVM 5.0 or later.
Last but not least, Mesa 17.0.3 promises to improve building with Microsoft Visual C++ (MSVC). You can find the full changelog attached at the end of the article, and you can download the source tarball right now from our website if you fancy compiling Mesa on your favorite GNU/Linux distribution. There are a total of 37 changes included in this update, which is recommended for all Linux users.