14 DAY TRIAL // As expected, the sixth point release to the Mesa 17.0 stable graphics stack was officially unveiled by Andres Gomez and will soon be available from the software repositories of your favorite GNU/Linux distribution.
Containing a total of 55 changes, which include both new functionality and fixes for recently discovered bugs, we can say that Mesa 17.0.6 is a hefty maintenance update that all users of the Mesa 17.0 3D Graphics Library series should install. That, of course, if they didn't already upgrade to the newer Mesa 17.1 stable branch.
The main highlight of the Mesa 17.0.6 release is Polaris 12 support for the Radeon RADV Vulkan driver, along with better Polaris 12 support for the RadeonSI graphics driver, which received several improvements for Volcanic Islands (VI) and Southern Islands (SI) series of AMD Radeon GPUs.
"RadeonSI has seen adjusted the ESGS ring buffer size computation on VI while, on SI, it has gotten a fix for the gl_PrimitiveID in tessellation with instanced draws. Additionally, a hang workaround has been applied to POLARIS12 too," reads the mailing list announcement.
Intel ANV Vulkan, Intel i965, and Freedreno drivers received bug fixes
Of course, Mesa 17.0.6 also contains various improvements for other drivers except the Radeon ones, such as Intel ANV Vulkan, Intel i965 OpenGL, Etnaviv, Gallium, and Freedreno, and it looks like the Travis CI received quite a lot of attention in this new maintenance update to the Mesa 17.0 stable series.
Notable here is support for LLVM 3.8 or later on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) based Travis CI via apt-get instead of apt addon, Radeon RADV Vulkan and RadeonSI driver support to continuous integration, support for Gallium state-tracker targets, apt-cache support, and support for almost all Gallium drivers.
Another important change in Mesa 17.0.6 is that the SCons build system was finally updated to support LLVM 4.0, which should bring yet another layer of performance improvements for those who want to play the latest Linux games. Mesa 17.0.6 is coming soon to the stable repositories of your favorite distro, but you can also download the source tarball right now from our website.