Mesa 22.3.3 Brings More Intel & Radeon Driver Fixes, KDE Plasma Hang Workaround

For those sticking to the bi-weekly Mesa 22.3 point releases rather than riding Mesa Git, Mesa 22.3.3 is out today in providing the very latest fixes to this collection of open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers.

Eric Engestrom just released Mesa 22.3.3 with a new platter of fixes. As usual, most of the fixes side on the AMD Radeon and Intel OpenGL/Vulkan drivers given the prolific development by those vendors and associated stakeholders. On the Intel side there are a few smaller fixes to the ANV code and a lone fix to the Iris Gallium3D driver. On the AMD side there are ACO fixes, including for GFX11/RDNA3. On the RadeonSI Gallium3D side is a patch to fix possible crashes as well as an AV1 film grain output fix.

The Zink Gallium3D OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation has seen some fixes in this release now that Mike Blumenkrantz is back at work. There is also fixes to VC4 and V3DV, new DriConf workarounds for Metal Slug XX and Dune: Spice Wars and also a workaround for the KDE Plasma Shell.

The KDE Plasma Shell workaround in Mesa 22.3.3 is a workaround to deal with it freezing/hanging. This addresses a two month old bug report over the Plasma Shell sometimes hanging and was traced to be when RadeonSI Mesa enabled the OpenGL threading "mesa_glthread" functionality by default. Prior to Mesa 22.3, the "mesa_glthread" functionality for better performance relied on a constantly updated whitelist of games/applications that were known to benefit. So the workaround is simply disabling mesa_glthread when encountering the "plasmashell" application name. This isn't the first time that Mesa OpenGL threading has impacted KDE but back in October they blacklisted GL threading for KWin Wayland over it messing up cursor handling.

The full list of Mesa 22.3.3 changes can be found via the mailing list announcement. Meanwhile Mesa 23.0 as the next quarterly feature release should be out in/around March.