Mesa 18.2.1 Going Into Ubuntu 18.10 For Fresh Open-Source GPU Drivers

It was a bit nerve-racking seeing Mesa 18.1 still in use by the Ubuntu 18.10 "Cosmic Cuttlefish" in recent days, but fortunately it looks like the feature freeze exception is secured and Mesa 18.2 is on its way to landing.

Since yesterday, Mesa 18.2.1 is now queued in cosmic-proposed. It's not in the official "Cosmic" archive yet, but should soon be -- well in time for the Ubuntu 18.10 release expected on 18 October.

Mesa 18.2 brings a crazy amount of new features from new GPU support when it comes to Vega 20 to OpenGL 4.4 compatibility profile support for better Steam Play support, new Vulkan extensions, many RADV / ANV optimizations, various AMD APU tuning, and improvements as well to the smaller Mesa/Gallium3D drivers. It's a big update and would have been a shame if Mesa 18.2 hadn't made it into Ubuntu 18.10.

But fortunately Mesa 18.2.1+ is landing and pairs nicely with Linux 4.18 and X.Org Server 1.20.1 as the other key graphics components. So for Radeon and Intel graphics users especially, Ubuntu 18.10 will be shipping with a pleasantly fresh yet stable graphics driver stack whether you are looking for just a great desktop experience or also performant gaming on most GPUs, compatibility with more games via Steam Play / Proton, better Vulkan compatibility/performance, and various other enhancements. For NVIDIA Linux users, the packaged proprietary driver also remains updated in the archive.

For those wanting to track Mesa 18.3 development with the bleeding-edge changes, the Padoka and Oibaf PPAs are great ways of tracking Mesa Git on Ubuntu.