14 DAY TRIAL // Mesa, the open-source graphics stack for Linux-based operating systems, has been updated to this week to version 17.2.5, the fifth stability update to the Mesa 17.2 series.
While Mesa devs are still working hard on the next major release of the graphics stack, Mesa 17.3, which is expected to arrive next week with numerous exciting new features and enhancements for Intel and AMD Radeon GPUs, they pushed another maintenance update to Mesa 17.2 to fix bugs, memory leaks, hangs, and other issues.
For AMD GPUs, Mesa 17.2.5 brings various improvements to the AMD Radeon RADV Vulkan drive, including a fix for a GPU hang with Vulkan Dota 2 in VR mode, a correction for a DCC corruption visible with Rust, a memory leak, as well as an endless loop in the r600 driver.
For Intel gamers, the Mesa 17.2.5 update addresses a memory leak in the Intel i965 OpenGL open-source graphics driver, and another one in the compiler, avoiding GPU hangs with Intel Broxton chips. The Gallium i915g driver also received an important correction for Intel GPUs.
Improvements to GLSL, NIR, and SPIR-V compilers, Mesa Core fixes
In addition to the Intel and AMD Radeon improvements, the Mesa 17.2.5 maintenance update fixes a compile issue for Broadcom's VC4 driver, and adds various improvements to both the GLSL, NIR, and SPIR-V compilers to fix support for some Android games, such as Forge of Empires.
"The GLSL compiler is not giving a linker error for mismatching uniform precision with GLSL ES 1.00 anymore. This enables, especially, several Android applications which violate this rule, like Forge of Empires, for example," said Mesa developer Andres Gomez in the mailing list announcement.
Lastly, Mesa 17.2.5 fixes a Mesa Core OpenGL error related to the ARB_ES3_1_compatibility specification, which was noticed with the GFXBench 5 Aztec Ruins. Mesa 17.2.5 is making its way into the stable repositories of various popular GNU/Linux distribution as we speak, but you can also download the source tarball if you want to compile it yourself.