14 DAY TRIAL // Mesa developer Andres Gomez announced that the fifth point release of the Mesa 17.1 stable graphics stack for GNU/Linux operating system is coming soon with a bunch of performance improvements and bug fixes.
Mesa 17.1.5 seems to be a major update adding a lot of changes. For users of AMD Radeon GPUs, the update improves Float64 support by implementing 64-bit packing and unpacking, fixes various issues in the NIR to LLVM translation with image atomic names, repairs VRAM allocation size's limit, as well as the Factorio game.
For Intel users, the Intel i965 OpenGL graphics driver now has a proper maximum surface limit and received a few fixes to be capable of using the "true" distance for antialiased lines in Sandybridge, Ironlake and G45 GPUs. Mesa 17.1.5 also adds various improvements for the Gallivm, Etnaviv, SWR, and SVGA drivers, as well as for the GLSL and SPIR-V compilers.
"The SPIR-V compiler has gotten a fix for properly implementing OpBitcast," said Andres Gomez in the mailing list announcement. "The GLSL compiler has received a fix to enforce the GLSL ES 3.00+ rule that overloads or overrides of built-ins are disallowed. [...] In Mesa Core we include a fix to prevent a potential crash."
Mesa 17.1.5 set to land on Friday, July 14
Mesa 17.1.5 is currently in the Release Candidate (RC) stage, yet RC builds of Mesa are available for testing only internally by the development team to see what else needs to be improved before the final version lands. As for the final Mesa 17.1.5 release, we're looking at a July 14 launch, which is in about 24 hours (from writing this).
Once Mesa 17.1.5 is released tomorrow, we'll let you know so you can download the source tarball if you fancy compiling it on your GNU/Linux distribution, but we recommend waiting for it to land in the main software repositories of your favorite operating system and then update. Mesa 17.1.5 is a recommended update for all users using Mesa 17.1.4 or a previous version of the Mesa 17.1 stable series.