A Modularized Mesa 7.8 Is Published

Mesa 7.8 was released last week (and then yesterday an emergency 7.8.1 release arrived) in its traditional bundled form with the DRI drivers, but this afternoon a version with the popular hardware drivers modularized and built around an SDK, has been published.

In February at FOSDEM there was a proposal by Luc Verhaegen on cleaning up the Linux graphics stack by which he called for Mesa to be modularized and fundamental changes to other key Linux graphics components.

His work though was not well received by the X.Org development community at large, so then he proceeded to modularize Mesa and its DRI drivers on his own last month to show that more than just his VIA graphics stack will work under his plans. This work was based on Mesa 7.7 and again it pretty much fell on deaf ears. Now with Mesa 7.8 being out there, he has decided again to do the same SDK / modularization dance.

While aboard a train in Germany, Luc brought his Mesa DRI SDK to Mesa 7.8 and proceeded to update his independent Git repositories for the independent Mesa DRI drivers for the i810, i9xx, Mach64, MGA, r128, Radeon, Savage, SiS, Tdfx, and Unichrome. This should work just fine with 7.8.1 too, considering the lack of any major driver changes.

Luc announced this updated work on the Mesa3D development list, but so far no discussion has ensued nor has this modular design been attracted by any vendors.