Gallium3D "Nine" Improvements Inbound For Next Mesa Release

On top of the RADV Vulkan driver being queued for the next Mesa release, it looks like some improvements to the "Nine" Direct3D 9 Gallium3D state tracker are also en route for the new Mesa version.

Axel Davy, one of the lead developers of Gallium3D Nine, expressed his interest in seeing the Mesa feature freeze on 14 October rather than 7 October. His reasoning is that he has "a lot of patches for nine" that he'd still like to get cleaned up and tested. Emil Velikov has confirmed that the Mesa 12.1/13.0 feature freeze will now happen on 14 October to allow enough time for these Gallium3D Nine patches to land.

Axel hadn't elaborated on the Nine changes or what features may be in store; stay tuned to find out on Phoronix once the patches are sent off to the mailing list. With the feature freeze not happening now until the middle of the month and still needing some release candidates, this next Mesa release is now likely going to be released in early November as opposed to late October. Nevertheless, this next Mesa release sure is turning out to be quite exciting with OpenGL 4.4~4.5, RADV Vulkan, and more. With another week to the feature freeze, hopefully some of the lingering GL 4.4/4.5 Nouveau/RadeonSI patches will also have a chance to be reviewed and merged.