Feature development for this quarter's Mesa 21.1 release is now over with it having been branched from main and the first release candidate issued.

The feature freeze and code branching for Mesa 21.1 is imminent but last minute feature work continues to pour in. Hitting Mesa Git this morning as the latest activity were some fixes and improvements in Gallium Nine for providing Direct3D 9 support atop Gallium3D drivers to Wine/Windows programs.

The "Virgl" virtual 3D GPU project for providing OpenGL (and work-in-progress VirtIO-GPU Vulkan) acceleration within guest virtual machines continues to mature for improving the open-source Linux desktop virtualization stack.

It was just a few days ago was the talking of the VirtIO-GPU Vulkan driver looking to be upstreamed into Mesa and now this Google "Venus" project has indeed landed.

This quarter's Mesa 21.1 feature release will continue to offer more improvements for Lavapipe, the CPU-based software Vulkan implementation. The latest today is Vulkan 1.1 now being advertised.

Mesa 21.0.2 is out today as the latest bi-weekly point release to the Mesa3D open-source Vulkan/OpenGL drivers.

The VirtIO-GPU Vulkan driver is looking to be upstreamed in Mesa in allowing Vulkan support for virtualized guests that in turn is handled by the host's Vulkan driver/hardware.

For those that managed to get their hands on Radeon RX 6000 series hardware and are habitual Mesa Git users, the newest Mesa 21.1-devel code for RADV has a new knob for performance testing.

Mesa 21.1 is looking to be another exciting release to be introduced later this quarter while going into feature freeze around mid-April. The latest work to land is threaded context support for Zink, which means faster performance for this OpenGL-over-Vulkan implementation.

Mesa this quarter saw the release of Mesa 21.0 with many OpenGL and Vulkan improvements, a lot of work continues building up around the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation, Lavapipe continued advancing for software-based Vulkan, Intel and AMD continued with their stellar open-source hardware support, and performance optimizations in Mesa and lower down the stack are seemingly never-ending.

Mesa developers are currently discussing the raising of the default compiler baseline for Mesa drivers moving forward, which would raise the base CPU requirements for these open-source Mesa drivers unless overriding the compiler flags. However, only the very oldest systems would be negatively impacted.

Google's open-source SwiftShader has been supporting a software-based Vulkan implementation for some time, building off its prior OpenGL / GLES and D3D9 support. While SwiftShader's Vulkan implementation has received heavy investment and attention from Google, it turns out Mesa's Lavapipe software implementation is beginning to pull ahead.

Intel's latest addition to Mesa 21.1 with their "ANV" Vulkan driver is... A null hardware layer.

Panfrost has been the Gallium3D driver providing open-source OpenGL for Arm Mali Bifrost and Midgard GPus while now "PanVK" is in development as an open-source Vulkan driver.

When it comes to open-source Arm Mali graphics on Linux, the Panfrost Gallium3D driver is what's talked about the most given that it's for supporting newer generations of Mali graphics hardware. But the Lima Gallium3D driver effort remains ongoing for supporting older Mali 400/450 series hardware.

For those that tend to wait until at least the first point release before moving to a new Mesa feature release, Mesa 21.0.1 is out today while Mesa 20.3.5 was also released as the last of that Q4'2020 driver series.

Consulting firm Igalia continues working on the open-source Broadcom V3DV Mesa Vulkan driver that is most notably used by the Raspberry Pi 4 and later SBCs. Since reaching Vulkan conformance they have continued working on further enhancing the performance of this driver.

With Mesa 21.0 released earlier this month following a one month delay, the Mesa 21.1 release calendar has now been published for that next quarterly feature release.

It's been proposed in the past but never acted upon yet but the idea of dropping/retiring Mesa's "classic" OpenGL drivers from the mainline code-base and letting them potentially live on in an "LTS" branch has once again been brought up.

Mike Blumenkrantz who has been working under contract for Valve as part of their Linux graphics driver initiatives has provided a fresh status report on Zink as the Mesa Gallium3D effort for implementing OpenGL APIs atop Vulkan.

Igalia has outlined some of the recent V3D compiler work they've been engaging in to help with the Vulkan driver performance on the Raspberry Pi 4 while the compiler back-end work also benefits the Mesa OpenGL driver too.

In addition to recent commits improving Mesa's Gallium3D Direct3D 9 "Nine" state tracker and addressing memory issues with 32-bit games, this D3D9 state tracker is now enjoying another performance optimization helping some games.

Following several weeks of delays, Mesa 21.0 was officially released today as the newest quarterly feature update for this collection of predominantly open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers for Linux systems.

Last week Intel wired up Gallium3D threaded context support to their "Iris" OpenGL driver for yielding some sizable performance improvements. Now the Freedreno driver for Qualcomm Adreno hardware has hooked into the threaded context support as well.

The Mesa release train once again rode off the tracks but this week looks like it will get back on track with hopes of releasing Mesa 21.0 on Thursday.

It's been a while since last having anything to report on Waffle as the library abstracting OpenGL and windowing system selection to run-time while this weekend marked its v1.7 release.

For those using Gallium3D Nine as a Direct3D 9 state tracker when running Windows games on Linux rather than the likes of DXVK for going through Vulkan, next quarter's Mesa 21.1 will better handle 32-bit games with the Nine state tracker.

While DXVK has been receiving much attention these days for implementing Direct3D 9/10/11 atop the Vulkan API that can be consumed in a driver agnostic manner, Gallium Nine as a D3D9 state tracker going back years for Mesa continues to receive new work too.

While Mesa is most well known for providing OpenGL and Vulkan open-source drivers on Linux systems, via the "Clover" Gallium3D state tracker is also maturing support for OpenCL. But until now it hasn't been straight-forward to track the state of Mesa's OpenCL supported versions and extensions.

For those enjoying the Valheim, the new survival/sandbox game that has been an incredible success and sold more than four millions of copies so far while being a low-budget indie game, Mesa should be providing better performance when using its OpenGL renderer.