Mesa 11.2 Is Set For Branching In Just Two Weeks, Release In Just Over One Month

The race is on to see if any of the Mesa/Gallium3D hardware drivers (or core Mesa itself) will reach any new version levels for Mesa 11.2.

There is now just under two weeks to go until Mesa 11.2 is scheduled to be branched. Last month Mesa release manager Emil Velikov laid out the 11.2 release plans that call for the code to be branched on 19 February.

Once the code is branched and into the feature freeze, Mesa 11.2 RC1 will be tagged. Weekly release candidates are expected for at least three of them while the official Mesa 11.2 release is set for 11 March, unless additional release candidates are needed.

Mesa 11.2 has many improvements from more OpenGL 4 extensions, hardware support improvements, and a wide range of other changes to get excited about that I'll recap in future articles. Right now though core Mesa is held up on OpenGL 4.3 by ARB_robust_buffer_access_behavior and only partial support for ARB_internalformat_query2. Nouveau NVC0 is incredibly close to OpenGL 4.2 if it can get ARB_shader_image_load_store landed. It doesn't look like the Radeon drivers will hit any new GL levels this cycle. The Intel Mesa driver is still at OpenGL 3.3 compliance due to being held up by FP64 support.