Mesa 19.0.5 is now available as what is expected to be the second to the last release in the Mesa 19.0 series.

If all goes well the Mesa 19.1 release will be happening in the next week or two. But for those wanting to help test this open-source graphics driver stack, Mesa 19.1-RC3 was released today as the newest weekly release candidate.

The past few months AMD's Marek Olšák has been working on primitive culling support for the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver and last week that code was merged into the Mesa 19.2 development code.

We are coming up on the Mesa 19.1 quarterly feature release hopefully by the end of the month while out today is the second release candidate for evaluating this next big update to these OpenGL and Vulkan driver implementations.

Christian Gmeiner, one of the leading contributors to the Etnaviv Gallium3D code for providing open-source OpenGL driver coverage for Vivante graphics IP, has posted a series of patches for "EIR" as a new back-end IR based on NIR and other modern open-source driver graphics compiler back-ends.

Karol Herbst of Red Hat who has been working for more than the past year on providing OpenCL support in Gallium3D's "Clover" state tracker via SPIR-V so it can easily work with drivers like Nouveau seems to be approaching the finish line.

The Intel Gallium3D OpenGL driver performance is now in good shape for this new open-source Intel Linux GL driver compared to its "classic" Mesa driver, but there are still various other features to be ironed out before this "Iris" driver can become the new default. One of the items now crossed off the list is GPU hang recovery.

While Mesa 19.1 will be released in a few short weeks, Mesa 19.0.4 is now available as the latest stable version of this collection of open-source OpenGL/Vulkan drivers.

The Mesa 19.1 release candidate is running a few days behind schedule but the code branching has indeed occurred while Mesa 19.2 is now under development on Git master.

Longtime Mesa developer Nicolai Hähnle of AMD has sent out a big patch series today introducing a real runtime linker for the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver and hopefully to be used by the RADV Vulkan driver as well.

One of the early features merged back in February for Mesa 19.1 was the new Vulkan Overlay layer to expose various performance metrics akin to the Gallium3D "HUD" also living within Mesa. Ahead of the Mesa 19.1 feature freeze, some more capabilities are now added to this Vulkan overlay/HUD.

Landing in time for the imminent Mesa 19.1 branching and feature freeze is a set of Gallium "Nine" improvements for improving the Direct3D 9 support for Wine/Proton Windows gaming on Linux.

Softpipe, the Gallium-based software rasterizer fallback for Mesa (not to be confused with the faster LLVMpipe), has seen some OpenGL 4.x support additions land for the upcoming Mesa 19.1.

With Mesa 19.1 due to see its code branched this week and that marks the start of the feature freeze and release dance ahead of the official debut in late May, here are some development stats for the current state of the Mesa3D code-base.

While there are just a few days left to the Mesa 19.1 development period before the code branching and feature freeze, the Gallium Nine state tracker for Direct3D 9 acceleration with Mesa drivers has a set of last minute patches.

In addition to the work this week on exposing EXT_gpu_shader4 / EXT_texture_buffer_object, well known AMD open-source developer Marek Olšák has also been working a patch to help lower the input lag with Mesa.

While it's not looking like Mesa 19.1 will end up exposing OpenGL 4.6 capabilities, it is picking up various other extensions including some prominent several year old extensions like EXT_texture_buffer_object and the decade old EXT_gpu_shader4.

Adding to the list of Mesa 19.1 changes is now AMD_compressed_ATC_texture being plumbed into Mesa/Gallium3D primarily with a focus on the Freedreno driver.

The latest change merged for Mesa 19.1 is a workaround so the Epic Games' game launch correctly renders when using OpenGL.

Mesa 19.1 is due to be released at the end of May and for that to be the feature freeze is in two weeks followed by the weekly release candidates. With the feature development ending soon for this next quarterly Mesa release, the Radeon "RADV" and Intel "ANV" Vulkan driver developers in particular have been quite busy on their remaining feature work.

Mesa 19.1 is now even more exciting as RADV's co-lead, Bas Nieuwenhuizen has requested the Radeon Vulkan's FreeSync/Adaptive-Sync support be a blocker bug for this quarterly Mesa update.

Juan A. Suarez Romero of Igalia is serving as the release manager for Mesa 19.1 and sent out a reminder on Monday of the planned release schedule for this quarterly driver update.

Longtime open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver developer Ilia Mirkin is drafting a new OpenGL extension proposal for helping out in driver reverse-engineering efforts.

Broadcom's next-gen "V3D" driver (formerly known as VC5) being used by some newer Broadcom hardware but more coming down the pipeline in the future has nearly working compute shader support.

Following this week's testing of the Radeon Linux gaming performance between Ubuntu 18.10 and 19.04, I also ran some benchmarks on the Ubuntu 19.04 when manually switching over to the bleeding-edge Mesa 19.1 RADV/RadeonSI drivers paired with the Linux 5.1 Git kernel. Is that worthwhile for "Disco Dingo" users to gain better AMD Linux gaming performance?

The belated Mesa 19.0.2 is now available as the newest stable release to these open-source OpenGL/Vulkan drivers.

Seven years after Luc Verhaegen started the Lima driver project for open-source Mali graphics -- one of the first reverse-engineered, open-source Arm graphics driver attempts in general -- while he is no longer involved with the initiative, developer Qiang Yu picked it up and has successfully worked it into a functioning open-source OpenGL Gallium3D driver that has been merged into Mesa Git.

Mesa developers have been off to a busy start this week with a lot of new code merged affecting multiple drivers.

If you are still making use of Mesa 18.3 (or older), Mesa 18.3.6 is now available as the last planned update for this quarterly release stream as users should begin considering an upgrade to Mesa 19.0.x if not wanting to ride the 19.1-devel cycle.

Marek Olšák of AMD has merged his latest performance-enhancing feature into RadeonSI Gallium3D: the enabling of displayable DCC on Raven Ridge / Raven 2 APUs.