Mesa 7.11 Release Candidate 1 Arrives

While this is non-news for many Phoronix readers that are Mesa Git followers and already onto tracking Mesa 7.12-devel after using Mesa 7.11-devel for months already, for everyone else, the first release candidate of Mesa 7.11 is now available.

Mesa 7.11 will be officially released later in the month and then the Mesa 7.11.1 stable point release to follow shortly thereafter. Mesa 7.11 is what will be used within Ubuntu 11.10, among other Linux distributions not wishing to live on the bleeding edge of the open-source Linux graphics stack.

The brief release announcement of Mesa 7.11 RC1 can be found on the mailing list.

Mesa 7.11 contains a lot of new work, including:

- Intel DRI driver speed-ups and much improved Sandy Bridge support.
- R600 Gallium3D is built by default now that it has had tons of improvements.
- AMD Llano Fusion support.
- AMD Radeon HD 6000 series support for Northern Islands and Cayman ASICs.
- Initial Intel Ivy Bridge support (the successor to Sandy Bridge).
- GLSL compiler improvements.
- Support for more OpenGL 3.0 functionality.
- OpenGL floating-point textures support if the build-time switch is supplied to enable this patented feature.
- Many bug-fixes.