Mesa 17.0.5 Release Candidate is out now for public testing

Apr 28, 2017 15:27 GMT  ·  By

Andres Gomez was pleased to announce that a Release Candidate (RC) milestone of the upcoming Mesa 17.0.5 maintenance update to the stable Mesa 17.0 series is out, giving us a glimpse at the new improvements and bug fixes.

Mesa 17.0.5 should be available as soon as today, and it's the fifth bugfix release in the series, coming about two weeks after the launch of Mesa 17.0.4, which added various improvements to the Intel OpenGL and ANV Vulkan drivers, as well as RadeonSI, Radeon RADV Vulkan, Nouveau, Galleon, and Freedreno drivers.

There are 38 queued changes and 7 nominated (outstanding) in the changelog attached at the end of the article, showing us that the Intel ANV Vulkan driver received some attention during this cycle, including some corrections for flushing the cache for both texture and VF, and support for disabling CCS on BDW input attachments.

"We have several fixes for Intel drivers. The Vulkan driver has some corrections for flusing the cache (VF and texture) while setting up a null surface state, which is cheaper than calculating when one is needed and corrections for the handling of the VK_ATTACHMENT_UNUSED," said Andres Gomez in the mailing list announcement.

Intel i965 driver to offer better performance in Unigine Heaven

The Intel i965 OpenGL driver was updated in Mesa 17.0.5 to offer better performance in Unigine Heaven, as well as to improve the register coalesce optimization, and it looks like the Nouveau driver received a fix for an issue with the instructions emission with GF100's ISA encoding.

A bunch of RadeonSi fixes and improvements should be present in the upcoming Mesa 17.0.5 update, fixing image buffers and texture buffer objects with IDXEN==0, and all the issues with shader images, including 1D array shader images, but also adding a workaround for viewing a slice of 3D as a 2D image.

On the other hand, the Radeon RADV Vulkan driver was patched to properly report the timestampPeriod, and the state tracker will now correctly invalidate the readpix cache on Gallivm, which should no longer hang when apps call exit. Additionally, several patches were added on the integration side to improve build errors and configure.

Under the hood, Mesa 17.0.5 includes corrections in the API (Application Programming Interface) validation, patches glMultiDrawArrays handling, fixes sampler types validation, and enhances the use of ARB_shader_clock in NIR. In the meantime, Mesa devs are working hard on the major Mesa 17.1.0 stable series, which received a second RC earlier this week.

Mesa 17.0.5 RC Changelog