Latest Mesa Update Lands In Ubuntu 16.04, Enables OpenGL 4.1 With LLVM 3.8

In the process of landing in the Ubuntu 16.04 "Xenial Xerus" package archive is the newly-minted Mesa 11.1.2. While a point release update for Ubuntu of Mesa isn't usually noteworthy, with this change they are also building against LLVM 3.8 to allow OpenGL 4.1 support for the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver.

One day after the Mesa 11.1.2 release, Timo Aaltonen pushed down the update for Ubuntu that in turn is based on the Mesa packaging work in upstream Debian. But making it exciting is that the packaging also changed up so it now builds against the LLVM 3.8 packaging rather than LLVM 3.6.

With this change, it allows OpenGL 4.1 to be exposed for the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver (and GL 4.1 on R600g if you have a HD 6900 / HD 5800 series GPU) as for exposing this support there was a requirement on the AMDGPU back-end changes found in LLVM 3.7.

Mesa 11.2 will still hopefully make it for Ubuntu 16.04, but today's milestone is great for those wanting better RadeonSI support right now on Ubuntu 16.04 without having to build your own Mesa or rely upon third-party packages.