Mesa 21.2 Released With New Intel Crocus Driver, PanVK, Early M1 Code

Mesa 21.2 is out as the latest quarterly update to this open-source Linux graphics driver stack for user-space, most notably providing the Intel and Radeon OpenGL/Vulkan drivers among others.

Mesa 21.2 was a very smooth cycle and has debuted without needing any extra release candidates. Mesa 21.2 highlights include:

- The Crocus Gallium3D driver was merged for allowing Gallium3D OpenGL support on older Intel Gen4/i965 through Haswell graphics.

- PanVK was merged as the initial open-source Vulkan driver targeting Arm Mali GPUs.

- The NVIDIA-contributed support for handling alternate GBM back-ends.

- More work on Intel Xe-HP support albeit still work in progress.

- Support for building the RADV driver on Windows.

- Zink can now render glxgears correctly along with other improvements to this OpenGL-on-Vulkan translation layer.

- Fragment shading rate support for the Intel ANV Vulkan driver.

- OpenGL ES 3.1 for select GeForce 200 series GPUs on Nouveau.

- Opt-in NGG culling support for the RADV driver with RDNA(2) GPUs.

- Early Apple M1 graphics code albeit still very much a work in progress for this version.

- Intel made more Vulkan ray-tracing preparations.

- Various Vulkan extensions wired up for the Intel ANV and Radeon RADV drivers, among others.

- Dozens of different bug fixes.

See the release announcement for more details.