Mesa 20.1 has managed to release on time today as this quarter's feature update to this collection of open-source user-space graphics driver components.

The release of Mesa 20.1 is imminent as the latest quarterly feature update to this collection of open-source OpenGL/Vulkan drivers predominantly in use by Linux systems. Here is a look at the many exciting improvements with Mesa 20.1.

The fourth weekly release candidate is available of Mesa 20.1, the Q2'2020 feature update to the open-source OpenGL / Vulkan driver stack predominantly used by Linux systems. This is the last scheduled release candidate with Mesa 20.1 stable potentially coming out next week if testing goes well and the remaining blocker bugs are addressed.

While already various changes are building up for Mesa 20.2, the Mesa 20.1 release process is still progressing with hopes of shipping this quarter's stable release later in the month.

Mesa 20.2-devel has a new cache in place for TTN.

The Zink Gallium3D driver project that is layering OpenGL over Vulkan is one step closer to exposing OpenGL 3.0 capabilities.

Con Kolivas known for his longtime work on improving Linux desktop responsiveness with largely working on the kernel and the likes of MuQSS has now seen his first Mesa patch merged for fixing unexpected GUI-related stalls.

On Wednesday marked the second weekly release candidate for the forthcoming Mesa 20.1.

David Airlie's "multi-sample support extravaganza" for the LLVMpipe software driver has been merged into Mesa 20.2-devel.

Mesa 20.1 feature development is now over with it being branched from Git master and subsequently Mesa 20.1-RC1 being released this evening.

One of the many new features coming in Mesa 20.1 is experimental NIR support for the vintage Radeon "R600g" driver. That NIR back-end isn't yet to feature parity but is now one step closer with tessellation support now being available along this code path.

After the merge request was open for more than a half-year, Mesa 20.1 has landed a Vulkan device selection layer for choosing between multiple Vulkan-enabled GPUs on a given system as the default device.

Due to unclear communication over patches queued for a given Mesa point release and ensuring all relevant patches are included, Mesa developers will begin making use of Gitlab's "milestones" functionality for tracking the work to be included in the next point release.

While Mesa 20.1 will soon be hitting its feature freeze with hopes of releasing as stable in May, for now the Mesa 20.0 series is the "latest and greatest" on the stable front. Mesa 20.0.5 rolled out today with three weeks worth of fixes.

Mesa's DRM library (libdrm) that resides between the Mesa drivers and the Direct Rendering Manager kernel interfaces now has proper FreeBSD support upstream in this important library.

After being in code review the past half-year, support for Shared Virtual Memory (SVM) within Gallium3D's "Clover" OpenCL state tracker was just merged for Mesa 20.1.

The TURNIP open-source Vulkan driver continues advancing in-step with the other Mesa drivers.

The AMD "ACO" compiler backed by Valve for offering a faster shader compiler back-end than AMDGPU LLVM for the RADV open-source Radeon Vulkan driver has begun making use of Navi's NGG "Next-Gen Geometry" hardware.

One month ago to the day I was writing about OpenGL threading improvements for Mesa 20.1 and since then more "GLTHREAD" work has materialized and successfully landed for improving the Mesa OpenGL driver performance.

It's been another busy week for Mesa's RADV Vulkan driver with the Valve-backed ACO compiler back-end alternative to AMDGPU LLVM.

The recently covered NIR vectorization pass ported from AMD's ACO back-end for improving the open-source Intel Linux graphics performance has landed now in Mesa 20.1.

Well known open-source AMD OpenGL driver developer Marek Olšák has enabled more Linux games to run with Mesa's GLTHREAD functionality enabled for helping with the performance.

While many of you are users of Mesa Git for experiencing the bleeding-edge graphics drivers especially if you are a gamer wanting peak performance, for those on the Mesa stable series the Mesa 20.0.3 update has now shipped.

Back in December was a developer discussion over dropping or forking non-Gallium3D drivers. Since then the Intel "Iris" Gallium3D driver has successfully become the default OpenGL driver for Broadwell/Gen8 and newer while the non-Gallium3D drivers continue to just face bit rot. The discussion over dropping/forking non-Gallium3D Mesa drivers has been reignited.

In hopefully meaning less regressions moving forward for DXVK with the latest open-source Vulkan drivers, the Mesa continuous integration (CI) infrastructure saw support added for playing DirectX (DXGI) traces with DXVK/Wine.

Well known open-source AMD RadeonSI Gallium3D driver developer Marek Olšák has been focusing recently on improvements to glthread for OpenGL threading that is generally able to offer better performance.

This should come as little surprise to regular Phoronix readers and those that follow the Mesa release cadence, but Mesa 20.1 as the next quarterly feature release now has a release calendar putting its debut towards the end of May.

For the past year Mesa has offered a "soft" implementation of FP64 capabilities for GPUs lacking FP64 hardware capabilities in order to support ARB_gpu_shader_fp64 as required by OpenGL 4.0. Optimizations were merged today to significantly enhance the "soft FP64" capabilities of Mesa.

Mesa 20.0.2 is out this evening as the latest stable bug-fix update for the Mesa Q1'2020 driver series.

The Turnip Mesa Vulkan driver for Qualcomm Adreno graphics processors can now handle transform feedback.