Mesa 8.1 was a development version of Mesa prior to being re-versioned as Mesa 9.0 during its development stage due to reaching OpenGL 3.1 compliance.

Mesa 8.1 Articles & Reviews

Radeon Gallium3D Has Made Much Progress In Two Years   Display Drivers   2012-08-08
LLVMpipe On Mesa 8.1 Performance   Display Drivers   2012-08-07
Intel Sandy Bridge Is Performing Well On Mesa 8.1   Display Drivers   2012-08-03
Intel Ivy Bridge Performance Drops In Mesa 8.1   Display Drivers   2012-07-30
R300 Gallium3D Driver In Mixed State For Mesa 8.1   Display Drivers   2012-07-27
Mesa 8.1 Will Offer Some Speed Improvements For Nouveau   Display Drivers   2012-07-25
AMD Radeon R600g Gallium3D: Mesa 8.0.4 vs. 8.1 Git   Display Drivers   2012-07-18
Mesa 8.1-devel On Radeon Gallium3D   Display Drivers   2012-02-24

Mesa 8.1 Linux & Open-Source News

VIA Secretly Has A Working Gallium3D Driver   Mesa   2013-04-02
How Ubuntu Intel Graphics Changed In One Month   Ubuntu   2012-10-10
Nine Good Things About Mesa 9.0   Mesa   2012-10-09
Mesa 9.0 Officially Released, Supports OpenGL 3.1   Mesa   2012-10-08
Mesa 9.0 Gets A Release Date That's Very Soon   Mesa   2012-09-29
Going To Mesa 9.0 Is Official With Intel OpenGL 3.1   Intel   2012-08-30
Radeon Gallium3D Now Does MSAA On R600   Radeon   2012-08-27
Mesa 9.0 Branching Delayed So More Features Can Land   Mesa   2012-08-21
Mesa Release Shake-Up: Mesa 8.1 Is Now Mesa 9.0   Mesa   2012-08-10
MSAA Anti-Aliasing For AMD Radeon Evergreen GPUs   Radeon   2012-08-09
Intel Announces OpenGL ES 3.0 Plans For Mesa   Intel   2012-08-09
OpenGL 4.3 Support Is A Ways Out In Mesa   Mesa   2012-08-06
Upcoming Linux Benchmarks For August 2012   Free Software   2012-08-01
RadeonSI Gallium3D Driver Can Now Handle Gears   Radeon   2012-07-30
Intel Mesa Driver Ups Counter-Strike Performance   Intel   2012-07-28
Testing Intel Sandy Bridge LLC Cache Controls   Intel   2012-07-27
Mesa Support For OpenGL Geometry Shaders   Mesa   2012-07-27
Intel Releases 12.07 Linux Graphics Package   Intel   2012-07-24
RadeonSI Gallium3D Gets New State Handling   Radeon   2012-07-24
Open-Source OpenCL Isn't Even Ready For Fedora   Fedora   2012-07-23
The OpenGL Support State For Mesa 8.1   Mesa   2012-07-12
Intel Merges Mesa Hardware Context Support   Intel   2012-07-11
Qt Looks Towards Using OpenGL 3.x, ANGLE   Qt   2012-06-27
R600 Gallium3D Expands On Stream-Out By Default   AMD   2012-06-19
Compute Code For AMD Cayman Lands In Mesa   AMD   2012-06-07
AMD Evergreen Compute Support Lands Mainline   AMD   2012-06-01
LLVMpipe Still Doesn't Work For Linux Gaming   Linux Gaming   2012-05-28
AMD RadeonSI HD 7000 Gallium3D Still Being Raised   Radeon   2012-05-15
The X.Org Plans For Ubuntu 12.10   Ubuntu   2012-05-09
OpenGL 3.1 Not Likely In Mesa Until 2013   Mesa   2012-05-04
Upcoming Linux Hardware Tests, Benchmarks   Linux Gaming   2012-05-02
Image Quality: Intel Ivy Bridge vs. Radeon Gallium3D   Intel   2012-04-28
New "NV30" Nouveau Driver Still Causes Pain   Nouveau   2012-04-22
Nouveau Kepler Works, But May Fill Your Hard Drive   Nouveau   2012-04-15
A Massive Nouveau Code Push Happened Today   Nouveau   2012-04-13
Gallium3D LLVMpipe Driver On LLVM 3.1   Mesa   2012-04-09
AMD Finally Publishes New Gallium3D Driver (RadeonSI)   Radeon   2012-04-05
OpenCL/Clover Is Closer To Mesa Merging   Mesa   2012-04-02
Gallium3D Compute Infrastructure Is On Approach   Mesa   2012-03-22
NVIDIA Releases 295.33; Kepler Gallium3D Soon   NVIDIA   2012-03-22
Mesa 8.1-devel Performance With Intel's DRI Driver   Intel   2012-03-20
Intel Haswell Graphics Code Begins Appearing   Intel   2012-03-19
How To Begin Using OpenCL With Radeon Gallium3D   Radeon   2012-03-17
What's Left For LLVMpipe Before OpenGL 3.0   Mesa   2012-03-11
Intel Preparing GLSL 1.40 Support For Mesa   Intel   2012-03-09
AMD Launches Pitcairn GPUs, Open-Source Not There   AMD   2012-03-06
Gallium3D VDPAU State Tracker Gets Ready For Action   AMD   2012-02-28
What Would You Like To See Out Of Mesa 8.1?   Mesa   2012-02-27
A Pleasant Surprise In Mesa 8.1 Radeon Gallium3D   Mesa   2012-02-22
Changes To Merging Feature Work In Mesa   Mesa   2012-02-16
Mesa 8.0 Advances Open-Source Linux Graphics Drivers   Mesa   2012-02-09
Radeon Gallium3D Hierarchical-Z Updated (R600)   Radeon   2012-02-08
Nouveau Can Do OpenCL Compute For Open-Source NVIDIA   Nouveau   2012-02-06
Intel Haswell Graphics Driver To Be Opened Up Soon   Intel   2012-02-06
Radeon R600 Tiling Patches Are Ready   Radeon   2012-02-04
Cleaning Up The R600 Gallium3D Driver   Mesa   2012-01-31
R600 Gallium3D Can Now Do OpenGL 3.0, GLSL 1.30   Mesa   2012-01-29
The OpenCL State Tracker Nears Working State   Mesa   2012-01-25
In OpenCL Push, AMD Makes Progress With LLVM For Gallium3D   Mesa   2012-01-16
Closer To Radeon H.264 VDPAU In Gallium3D   Mesa   2012-01-15
2D Color Tiling Patches Hit For Radeon R600+   Radeon   2012-01-12
New Mesa Uniform Buffer Object Patches Posted   Mesa   2011-12-25
Radeon HD 7000 Series Linux Driver Support   Radeon   2011-11-16