Mesa 24.2 Released With New Vulkan Extensions, New Shader Cache

Mesa 24.2 is out today as stable for this quarterly feature release to these open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers used commonly on Linux systems and other platforms.

Mesa 24.2 has a lot of the bring-up work for AMD RDNA4/GFX12 next-generation graphics, a lot of enablement work for Intel Xe2 graphics coming with Lunar Lake and Battlemage graphics cards, various RadeonSI / RADV performance optimizations, a number of new RADV and ANV Vulkan extensions, and various other features. Mesa 24.2 also brings a new shader cache implementation, a number of V3DV Vulkan improvements for the Raspberry Pi 5, and continued Lavapipe and Zink enhancements.

Today's official Mesa 24.2 release announcement sums up this quarterly release as:

"- VK_KHR_dynamic_rendering_local_read on RADV
- VK_EXT_legacy_vertex_attributes on lavapipe, ANV, Turnip and RADV
- VK_MESA_image_alignment_control on RADV
- VK_EXT_shader_replicated_composites on ANV, dozen, hasvk, lavapipe, nvk, RADV, and Turnip
- VK_KHR_maintenance5 on v3dv
- VK_KHR_maintenance7 on RADV
- VK_EXT_depth_clamp_zero_one on v3dv
- GL_ARB_depth_clamp on v3d
- Defaulting to a new shader cache implementation, reducing filesystem overhead."

Eric Engestrom once again did a great job managing this release and getting it shipped in a punctual manner.

Mesa 24.2 in turn is what should be the default graphics driver stack of Ubuntu 24.10 and other upcoming Linux distribution releases.