Mesa 23.0.1 Released With Many Fixes For Intel / AMD / Zink

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Mesa 23.0.1 Released With Many Fixes For Intel / AMD / Zink

It's been one month since the release of Mesa 23.0 while it's finally been succeeded by Mesa 23.0.1 as the first point release containing a wide variety of bug fixes throughout this ecosystem of open-source 3D graphics drivers...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Mesa-23.0.1-Released

[shmerl]

Nice to see Debian experimental getting it so quickly. It allows updating Mesa even during the freeze.

[hwertz]

sorry to be a newbie but everyone has to start somewhere hehe! MESA drivers , are they the open-source ones? And do they come with Ubuntu ? How often it is maintained by Ubuntu ? Thanks for your feedback, and don't be too hard on me hahaha.

Ubuntu the answer is slightly complicated. Ubuntu 22.04 shipped with some xorg, kernel, and mesa version, and they continue to backport fixes to that series of kernel, xorg, and mesa. If you have "hwe" packages installed ("hardware enablement stack") kernel, xorg, and mesa installed then you get a new series every 6 months (like around when Ubuntu 22.10 came out it switched to it's kernel, mesa, and xorg; wen 23.04 comes out it'll switch to that one.) That gives the choice of servers or whatever where everything is already running just so can avoid any potential disruptions, while everyone else can get the benefits of more up to date hardware and video support.

I see now, Ubuntu 22.04 "hwe" mesa is only at Mesa 22.2.5; 22.3.x and now 23.0.x have come out since so it's a tad out of date.

I can heartily recommend kisak-mesa ppa, I've run that on all my systems and it's great. My previous notebook with a Ryzen, I needed hwe kernel and PPA mesa to go from "barely working" to "runs every game I throw at it at", usually on max settings. My current system has an 11th gen Intel CPU (with integrated Intel Xe graphics), the mesa-ppa helps it out too; it's not as fast as the Ryzen, so a few games I turned things to low or medium that the Ryzen would run on high. But it's pretty good. Even if you have an older GPU, go for it! Improvements to Mesa still benefit the old stuff from time to time, my friend has a 12 year old Sandy Bridge system and some Mesa update a year or two back gave it a serious speed boost, these couple games that'd chug along at like 15-20FPS started doing 25-30!

(Edit: On my desktop at home, I stuck a Nvidia GTX 1650 in it, which is a bit overpowered for the Ivy Bridge quad-core in there; not that it's a problem, but gravitymark and a few GPU stress tests like this are the only thing that can get it to 100% usage, any game I run (that is not synced to monitor frame rate), the GPU hits maybe 50% utilization before the CPU pegs out. But I've gotten 60FPS+ in everything so far on it. If you have an Nvidia GPU, I would just install the nvidia drivers, they were quite good when I started with Linux 20+ years ago and they're still good now. I'd be interested to see how Nvidia driver versus nouveau run on some model that both support well, I suppose I should look around on phoronix for one ...)

Couple PPAs -- turtle stays "1 version back" (on the theory that a fresh 23.0.0 for have bugs that 22.3.x doesn't). Turtle is at 22.3.6 at the moment. kisak-mesa has 23.0.1, I just got it in my updates today. I have not had problems with kisak-mesa myself.

https://launchpad.net/~kisak/+archive/ubuntu/turtle

https://launchpad.net/~kisak/+archive/ubuntu/kisak-mesa

Enjoy!
--Henry

[Particle]

sorry to be a newbie but everyone has to start somewhere hehe! MESA drivers , are they the open-source ones? And do they come with Ubuntu ? How often it is maintained by Ubuntu ? Thanks for your feedback, and don't be too hard on me hahaha.

There are a couple different components that could be referred to as a driver. There is the kernel module which is the driver for the hardware device itself. For Intel and AMD cards, the answer for most people will be yes. The i915 (Intel) and AMDGPU kernel modules are open source. They do, however, rely on proprietary firmware blobs that allow the devices the driver knows how to control actually work.

Then there is this, Mesa, which sits between the application and the hardware. It's also a driver of sorts, but more of an API. The implementations of Vulkan and OpenGL are among the most important parts of Mesa. Your games look for a 3D driver to talk to and this is it. Mesa will talk to the kernel. The kernel controls the hardware. Mesa is also open source. There are alternatives that aren't Mesa that serve the same function.

[mathieu.cossette]

Thanks, I appreciate your feedback ! Well explained

[mangeek]

Ubuntu the answer is slightly complicated.

Yes. The TL;DR version is:

Ubuntu releases will have a reasonably fresh Mesa when shipped. If you're on the LTS releases of Ubuntu (20.04, 22.04), you can enable a 'backport' of newer kernels and graphics drivers from the faster-cadence releases (22.10, 23.04); that's called the called 'HWE stack' and it's enabled by default for Desktop Ubuntu, and disabled by default on Ubuntu Server installs.

You can also enable a 'PPA', which lets you subscribe to a specific person or team's packages that aren't supported by Ubuntu.

The super-short answer is that if you do an install of Ubuntu from a 'Desktop' ISO, you'll always have reasonably fresh Kernel and Mesa drivers. If you do an install from the 'Server' ISO, you'll either have to enable HWE (on the biennial LTS releases) or keep your release updated to the latest version every six months.

[Zeroedout]

a fee Radeon R600g "SFN" NIR back-end fixes

I think you meant "few"

Unless we're going proprietary now ಠ⁠_⁠ಠ

[hwertz]

Yes. The TL;DR version is:

Ubuntu releases will have a reasonably fresh Mesa when shipped. If you're on the LTS releases of Ubuntu (20.04, 22.04), you can enable a 'backport' of newer kernels and graphics drivers from the faster-cadence releases (22.10, 23.04); that's called the called 'HWE stack' and it's enabled by default for Desktop Ubuntu, and disabled by default on Ubuntu Server installs.

Thanks! I thought there should have been a shorter and clearer way to describe Ubuntu's release cycle!

Again, I do recommend the PPA if you're gaming -- the Mesa version they use is only about a year old, with bugfixes backported to it. But Mesa updates fast, I've gotten noticeable FPS improvements going from Ubuntu version to PPA. Vulkan releases come out fast now, and newer Mesa will support newer Vulkan features too. Similar to how demanding Windows games will want the newest video drivers (to use new D3D12 or Vulkan features), running those same demanding games in wine or Proton will also take advantage of newer video drivers. Of course, if your games work fine, or you're not gaming, Ubuntu's decision to run an older Mesa and backport bug fixes to it is perfectly sensible from the point of maximum stability.