The next release of Mesa, which will be released as either
Mesa 7.12 or
Mesa 8.0 (assuming OpenGL 3.0 compliance) next January, is already beginning to receive some exciting features. Mesa 7.11 isn't being released until the end of this month, but the changes taking place in Git master are quite enticing for those wishing to live on the bleeding-edge of open-source Linux graphics drivers.
In just the few weeks since Mesa 7.11 was branched, there's already been committed to Mesa 7.12-devel a number of
Intel Gallium3D driver improvements,
numerous OpenGL 3.0 advancements, the
Gallium3D XA State Tracker, and
floating-point depth buffers. Just being added to the list now for this next Mesa release will be the long-awaited Mesa pipe-video merge.
The Mesa pipe-video branch, which contains all of the Gallium3D work for bringing X-Video Motion Compensation (XvMC) and Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix (VDPAU) support, is about to be merged to Git master.
Christian König,
AMD's newest open-source employee from Germany, has been the developer largely responsible for
adding XvMC support to the R600g driver and more recently
he's been tackling VDPAU support for Radeon Gallium3D. This is after
the R300g video work before that by Christian and others.
Also responsible for part of Mesa pipe-video is Younes Manton, who was the Google Summer of Code student developer several years back that began on
Gallium3D video decoding support for Nouveau.
Per
this mailing list announcement today, Mesa pipe-video will soon land in Git master. More details at that time. Those interested in playing with pipe-video right now can find it
in this Git branch.