Intel's Linux Driver & Mesa Have Hit Amazing Milestones This Year

Kaveh Nasri, the manager of Intel's Mesa driver team within the Open-Source Technology Center since 2011, spoke this morning at XDC2017 about the accomplishments of his team and more broadly the Mesa community. Particularly over the past year there has been amazing milestones accomplished for this open-source driver stack.

Most Phoronix readers will not find anything in the presentation too much of a surprise. Nasri was mostly commenting on the different milestones for their driver from OpenGL 4.5 certification to Vulkan 1.0 and OpenGL ES certifications. There's also the milestones about their continued OpenGL/Vulkan driver advancements, the openness of their driver, and all of the benefits of their approach to development. And yes, the performance of the Intel driver stack continues improving.

Kaveh Nasri is also hoping to encourage new developers to get involved within Mesa development. He also mentioned several times during the presentation that Intel OTC is continuing to hire more developers, in struggling to seem to find the right candidates and always needing more experienced developer.

He shared this URL for those wanting to learn more about getting involved with Intel/Mesa development. He's also established a new blog at kavehnasri.com where he will try to highlight some of the accomplishments of his team.

Perhaps most interesting of the presentation was talking about the future and clearly indicating interest remains at Intel in Android. While Intel seemed to have abandoned their Atom chips for mobile devices earlier this year, he suggests there will be new segments coming running the Android stack and that improving the Intel Mesa driver for Android remains a significant focus. And it's just not about Intel for Chrome OS / Android compatibility layer either, so that will be interesting to see what comes of Intel on Android in 2018, etc.

Nasri's presentation is embedded below and was the first talk of the day: