Mesa 18.2 Should Now Be Clear For Releasing With Its Many OpenGL/Vulkan Improvements

Mesa 18.2 ended up having two unscheduled release candidates due to open blocker bugs, but those issues have been cleared up and so this official quarterly update should be launching soon.

Mesa 18.2-RC5 was released on Wednesday due to two blocker bugs still persisting around an OpenGL Piglit regression as well as a performance regression, both affecting Intel hardware. But on Friday night it was confirmed that two new patches resolve those blockers and pass Intel's extensive validation suite. Thus Mesa 18.2.0 is cleared for landing.

We still may see a final test release (Mesa 18.2-RC6) next week before going gold, but needless to say, Mesa 18.2.0 should be shipping very soon.

Mesa 18.2 is delivering a plethora of improvements including OpenGL 4.4 compatibility profile support for RadeonSI, VirGL OpenGL 4.3 support, ASTC texture compression in Gallium3D, new Vulkan extensions for Intel ANV / Radeon RADV, OpenGL ES 3.2 for RadeonSI, AMD Vega 20 GPU support, performance optimizations, and much more outlined in that aforelinked article.

Mesa 18.3 meanwhile is the version in development on Git master and will be the final Mesa 2018 update due out around the end of November.