Mesa 18.1.9 is now available as the last planned point release of last quarter's release stream.

It hasn't been merged to Mesa 18.3-devel yet nor even published on the Mesa-dev list for review, but it turns out Valve's Samuel Pitoiset has begun working on a heads-up display (HUD) for the driver.

Quite a feat for modern open-source projects with large C/C++ code-bases developed over the years, Mesa3D can almost be compiled now without any warnings -- there's just one remaining.

Mesa 18.2.1 is out this morning as the first stable point release to the recently introduced Mesa 18.2 series. Mesa 18.2.1 marks the point at which it should be relatively safe for stable-minded users to switch over to this quarterly release stream.

As the first stable point release to the newly-christened Mesa 18.2, the Mesa 18.2.1 release is going to be a big one.

Earlier this month Valve developers began working on Mesa/RadeonSI fixes for Wolfenstein: The Old Blood to run nicely with the open-source Linux drivers while the game is running under Steam Play / Proton. The last batch of these fixes for The Old Blood are now in Git for Mesa 18.3.

Just days after the patches were published for enabling 16-bit integers within shaders for the RADV driver, this Radeon Vulkan driver code has been merged.

For those currently relying upon Autotools for building Mesa3D, the days are numbered and soon will likely need to shift over to their modern Meson build system support.

With Q3 coming towards an end, here is a fresh look at the Mesa Git development trends for the year-to-date. Mesa on a commit basis is significantly lower than in previous years, but there is a new top contributor to Mesa.

It's been a while since last having major progress to report on the Broadcom VideoCore 4 (VC4) open-source driver stack most notably used by the Raspberry Pi boards or the next-generation Broadcom VideoCore "V3D" driver stack. The lack of recent progress has been due to lead developer Eric Anholt being away on paternity leave, but he is back now with another update on this open-source ARM graphics undertaking.

While the Mesa OpenGL/Vulkan drivers have matured into great shape particularly over the past two years for vastly improving the Linux gaming experience on Radeon and Intel hardware, with Valve's Steam Play allowing more Windows games on Linux via Proton/Wine has opened up Mesa to needing a lot more optimizations, workarounds, and dealing with other intricacies. The latest receiving the special treatment is Wolfenstein: The Old Blood.

Following a few delays that pushed back its release date from August to ultimately today, Mesa 18.2 is out as this third-quarter 2018 update to the Mesa3D graphics driver stack most commonly associated with the Linux desktop's open-source Vulkan/OpenGL drivers for Intel, Radeon, and Nouveau (as well as many smaller drivers).

In addition to Mesa 18.2 expected today, also out this Friday is Mesa 18.1.8 as the latest stable point release for this important piece of the open-source Linux graphics stack.

Mesa 18.2 as the third-quarter feature update for this collection of primarily Vulkan/OpenGL drivers is expected to make its official debut on Friday.

Alyssa Rosenzweig and others working on the "Panfrost" out-of-tree Gallium3D driver for ARM Mali graphics hardware have now succeeded in bringing up the newer ARM Mali T860 graphics processor on this open-source driver.

Mesa 18.2 ended up having two unscheduled release candidates due to open blocker bugs, but those issues have been cleared up and so this official quarterly update should be launching soon.

Mesa 18.2 will be slipping into September with two open Intel driver bugs still blocking the official release.

The work done by Valve open-source Linux GPU driver Timothy Arceri to implement OpenGL 4.5 compatibility profile has been merged into Git master for next quarter's Mesa 18.3 release.

Mesa 18.1.7 ships with the last two weeks worth of fixes in the Mesa stable space. But overall this isn't nearly as big as past Mesa 18.1 point releases. Mesa 18.1.7 has some minor fixes to R600 Gallium3D, Intel i965, RADV Vulkan driver fixes, the Doom workaround has been back-ported to RADV, and a variety of other fixes.'

Prolific Mesa contributor Marek Olšák has landed support for more OpenGL / OpenGL ES extensions into the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver.

The fourth release candidate of Mesa 18.2 is out today rather than the final release due to open blocker bugs still persisting.

As covered earlier this month, Emil Velikov at Collabora has been working on EGLDevice support for Mesa. These EGL extensions originally developed by NVIDIA are being pursued by Mesa developers for better dealing with the enumeration and querying of multiple GPUs on a system.

Mesa 18.2.0 is expected to be released in the days ahead as the latest quarterly feature release to this collection of open-source user-space graphics driver components. As has been the case each quarter for particularly the past few years, these timed quarterly releases are quite feature-packed.

With the Adreno 600 series support going into Linux 4.19 for the kernel bits, the user-space OpenGL driver support for the latest-generation Qualcomm graphics has now been merged into Mesa.

If you are looking to enjoy id Software's RAGE or Doom VFR games this weekend on Linux via Wine, they should be playing nicer with the latest open-source Mesa graphics driver code.

Mesa 18.2 as the next quarterly feature release to the contained OpenGL/Vulkan drivers is about two weeks out if all goes well, but today for testing Mesa 18.2-RC3 is now available.

Mesa 18.1.6 is now available as the latest point release for Mesa 18.1 as the Q2'2018 release of this collection of open-source graphics drivers/infrastructure.

While Mesa 18.2 is baking for release later this month, Mesa 18.1 remains the currently supported stable series. Final release preparations are underway for Mesa 18.1.6 as the latest bi-weekly point release.

One week after branching Mesa 18.2 and issuing the first release candidate, the second weekly RC is now available for testing.

While the EXT_gpu_shader4 extension was written for the OpenGL 2.0 days a decade ago when the GeForce 8 series was NVIDIA's flagship products, AMD's Marek Olšák is now adding support for this extension to the Gallium3D drivers.