Mesa 19.3.0 Not Expected Until December - RC4 Released With ACO Fixes

Mesa 19.3 had been expected for release next week per their original release calendar, but as we are used to seeing for these quarterly feature releases, at least one if not more weekly release candidates tend to be needed for ironing out bugs. As such, Mesa 19.3.0 is now solidly looking like at least an early December release while Mesa 19.3-RC4 shipped on Wednesday.

Mesa 19.3-RC4 brings a number of fixes to the recently merged "ACO" compiler back-end for the RADV Vulkan driver that was developed by Valve. Mesa 19.3 is the first release with this ACO back-end in mainline and looks to be in good shape for those wanting to flip it on with a RADV_PERFTEST=aco environment variable.

In addition to a number of ACO fixes, there are also some fixes to the Freedreno driver, Intel ANV Vulkan, the NIR intermediate representation code, fixing Unigine Sanctuary/Tropics rendering in the common Mesa state tracker code by blacklisting ARB_gpu_shader5 for those binaries, and other fixes.

Mesa 19.3-RC5 is expected next week while if all goes well Mesa 19.3.0 could then ship on 4 December. If not, it's 19.3-RC6 and then hopefully the official release would be ready one week later as to not interfere with the Christmas holidays.