Gallium3D To Enter Mainline Mesa Code

As we shared late last week, Mesa 7.3 is getting ready for release with the first release candidate having arrived. Mesa 7.3 will feature improved GLSL 1.20 support, support for the Graphics Execution Manager, and Direct Rendering Infrastructure 2 integration. The stabilized version of Mesa 7.3 will then go to make Mesa 7.4.

Beyond Mesa 7.4 we have learned some details as to what's next: merging Gallium3D to Mesa's master branch. Gallium3D, the new graphics architecture developed by Tungsten Graphics, has been in development for quite a while but is nearing a point of stabilization. If all goes according to plan, Gallium3D will see the light of day in Mesa 7.5. Brian Paul announced on the Mesa3D development mailing list that the gallium-0.2 branch will be merged to master following the Mesa 7.4 branching.

In somewhat related news, talks have revived about replacing portions of C code in Mesa with C++. That discussion can be followed in this thread.