Mesa 19.2's Feature Freeze / Release Candidate Process Beginning Tomorrow

Mesa 19.2 was supposed to be branched marking its feature freeze two weeks ago on 6 August along with the issuing of the first release candidate. That milestone has yet to be crossed but should happen tomorrow.

Mesa 19.2 development dragged on for the extra two weeks to allow some extra features to land. Those extra features were metrics/counters support for Intel Iris Gallium3D, CCS_E modifier support, and slice/sub-slice hashing optimizations for Intel -- a big performance win. Now that those blockers have landed, the release process is expected to get underway on Tuesday.

Mesa release manager Emil Velikov has indicated on Tuesday he will issue the first release candidate, which means the 19.2 code branching and feature freeze. Weekly release candidates will then commence.

Mesa 19.2.0 was supposed to be out by the end of August but now given the two week delay will almost definitely hit either early to mid September if not later due to blocker bugs.

Sadly not making the cut for Mesa 19.2 unless it lands in the final minutes is the remaining SPIR-V / OpenGL 4.6 bits for finishing off this two year old OpenGL specification support for at least the Intel driver while the RadeonSI driver should be close behind... But more than likely won't happen now until Mesa 19.3. Also for Mesa 19.3 is the expected default switch-over for the Intel OpenGL driver to Iris Gallium3D.