14 DAY TRIAL // Collabora's Emil Velikov has announced today the availability of three Mesa builds, one stable for the Mesa 12.0 series, and two development releases for the upcoming Mesa 17 branch, as well as the fourth maintenance update to Mesa 13.
We'll start with Mesa 12.0.6, which appears to be an extra, but also the last point release to the 12.0 stable branch, patching a CSO (Combined Sewer Overflow) issue that could lead to lockups of the graphics processing unit (GPU), as well as other unforeseen performance of the Gallium graphics drivers.
From the release announcement, it would appear that Mesa 12.0.6 fixes a total of 43 bugs discovered lately in the RadeonSI, Intel i965, and Nouveau open-source graphics drivers, along with the Intel (ANV) Vulkan driver, the GLX DRI3 GPU offloading support, and NIR, the new IR (internal representation) for the Mesa shader compiler.
"This is an extra release for the 12.0 stable branch, as per developers' feedback. There are no plans to have further 12.0.x releases. Users are encouraged to migrate to the 13.0 series in order to obtain future fixes," said Emil Velikov, Software Release Engineer at Collabora, in the mailing list announcement.
Mesa 17 RC2 fixes 34 bugs, Mesa 13.0.4 RC1 adds many fixes for RadeonSI
The development of the highly anticipated Mesa 17 series is on track, and today we're seeing the availability of the second Release Candidate, which attempts to address a total of 34 bugs since last week's RC1 build, improving the Freedreno Gallium3D driver, as well as the Intel i965, r600, RadeonSI, Radeon (RADV) and Intel (ANV) Vulkan drivers.
Also today, the fourth maintenance update for the Mesa 13.0 series got its first Release Candidate, which should go stable in two days from the moment of writing this article, on January 27, 2017. Mesa 13.0.4 promises multiple fixes for the RadeonSI and Intel i965 open-source graphics drivers.
It also attempts to patch an unusual glitch in the Freedreno Gallium3D driver and the popular glxgears OpenGL test tool. However, it looks like the star of the Mesa 13.0.4 point release will be the Intel (ANV) Vulkan driver, which will gain compatibility improvements with newer Vulkan loaders, some compliance and rendering fixes, and smoketesting.
With Mesa 12.0.6 being the latest stable release for the Mesa 12 branch, it is recommended that you immediately migrate to the stable Mesa 13 series, at least until Mesa 17 is hitting the stable channels in early February. In the meantime, you can test the new RCs by downloading them from our website.