14 DAY TRIAL // After teasing us a couple of days ago with the upcoming availability of the fifth maintenance update to the Mesa 17.1 3D Graphics Stack for GNU/Linux distributions, Mesa developer Andres Gomez is now announcing the final release of Mesa 17.1.5.
Mesa 17.1.5 comes only two weeks after the Mesa 17.1.4 update that probably many of you are using right now on your Linux distros, and it's here to add an extra layer of improvements for those using AMD Radeon or Intel graphics cards. First off, Mesa 17.1.5 fixes a potential crash in Mesa Core, adds better support for the GLSL and SPIR-V compilers, and solves a linking problem with standalone Android builds.
"The GLSL compiler has received a fix to enforce the GLSL ES 3.00+ rule that overloads or overrides of built-ins are disallowed," says Andres Gomez. "Also, it has corrected a problem by which the gl_Max{Vertex,Fragment}UniformComponents built-ins were not available from 4.10 onwards and another one by which we were incorrectly trying to manage the linking of the xfb_stride layout qualifier in the FS stage."
Here's what's new for AMD Radeon and Intel GPU users
For AMD Radeon GPU users, Mesa 17.1.5 improves the Float64 support by implementing 64-bit packing and unpacking, implements the ability for the "radeon" driver to limit the VRAM allocation size, improves support for the Factorio game, and repairs certain issues in the NIR to LLVM translation in regards to image atomic names.
For Intel GPU users, Mesa 17.1.5 adds a proper maximum surface limit to the Intel i965 OpenGL driver, along with the ability to use the "true" distance for antialiased lines in Intel Sandybridge, Intel Ironlake, and Intel G45 chips. In addition, Mesa 17.1.5 adds fixes various bugs for the Gallium, Etnaviv, SWR, and SVGA drivers, so we recommend updating to this version as soon as possible.
You can check out the full internal changelog below if you're curious to know what exactly was changed, and you can download the Mesa 17.1.5 source tarball right now if you fancy compiling your own software or you're an OS integrator. The rest of you should wait until Mesa 17.1.5 lands in the stable repositories of your favorite GNU/Linux distribution before updating.