In addition to Mesa 17.3.9 being released today, Mesa 18.0.1 also rolled out the door as the first point release to last quarter's Mesa 18.0 series.

For those still using the Mesa 3D release that debuted in Q4'2017, the Mesa 17.3.9 point release is now available while it's the last planned update for the series.

Mesa 18.0.1 is being planned for release on Wednesday as the first stable point release / maintenance update for this quarterly installment to Mesa 3D.

The Gallium3D Heads-Up Display (HUD) has matured into quite a useful option for Mesa users over the past several years. There is now a Gallium HUD "simple" option.

Mesa 17.3.9 is expected to be released at the start of next week as the final point release for the Mesa 17.3 driver series that was introduced back in Q4'2017.

The latest driver optimization work by Timothy Arceri on Valve's Linux GPU driver team has been working on function inlining within NIR rather than within the GLSL IR optimizations. The net result is faster NIR compile times that benefit the Intel OpenGL driver and also help with RadeonSI Gallium3D.

Last month I wrote about Broadcom's Eric Anholt exploring the use of AMDGPU's DRM scheduler within the in-development Video Core V (VC5) DRM driver. That work has panned out and looks like it will eventually work out for this open-source Broadcom graphics driver.

Landing in Linux 4.15 was performance counters support in the Etnaviv DRM driver as the low-level bits for exposing the hardware counters with this reverse-engineered, open-source Vivante graphics driver. The user-space/Mesa side code has now landed too.

Alyssa Rosenzweig who has been leading the charge recently on the open-source Mali T700 GPU driver that was called "Chai" but has been renamed to "Panfrost" is now pursuing a "half-way driver" approach to testing their knowledge of the hardware's command stream.

For those waiting until v18.0.1 before upgrading to the Mesa 18.0 series, Mesa 17.3.8 is now available as the latest release off this stable series from the end of 2017.

RadeonSI Gallium3D has caught up to the fellow Intel i965 and Nouveau NVC0 drivers in supporting the OpenGL KHR_blend_equation_advanced extension.

Marek Olšák of AMD has done some spring cleaning to the RadeonSI Gallium3D code in what he's calling a mega cleanup with 55 patches.

With the first quarter of 2018 now in the books, I ran GitStats on the current Mesa code-base as of this morning to see how things are looking for the year to date.

It looks like we're getting quite close to finally having OpenGL 4.6 in mainline Mesa.

While Mesa 17.3 started out very buggy, the developers have slowly been getting it into shape. If you are waiting to upgrade to the newly-released Mesa 18.0 until it further stabilizes with some point releases, Mesa 17.3.8 will be released in the days ahead as the latest and greatest off last quarter's driver code-base.

With support for the unreleased "Vega 12" AMD GPU seeing its kernel-side support coming with Linux 4.17, AMD's Marek Olšák has landed support for this scarcely detailed GPU now in their user-space OpenGL driver.

Mesa 18.0 managed to meet its Q1'2018 release target by just a couple of days... After being delayed a month and a half, Mesa 18.0.0 is now the latest stable version of this user-space driver stack most commonly associated with its OpenGL and Vulkan implementations.

With the latest Etnaviv DRM code there is now performance counters support for being able to read the hardware counters via perfmon domains. The patches have now been published for making use of these Vivante performance counters from user-space.

As a more modern and feature alternative to the DriConf configuration program for tweaking Mesa driver settings, a few months back we featured ADRICONF as the Advanced DRI Configuration. Recently this GUI program has picked up a few more features.

The RADV Vulkan driver performance on the latest Mesa Git code is already looking quite good compared to the NVIDIA Vulkan Linux performance and even the Vulkan driver on Radeon Software under Windows. But the game is not over for the never-ending process of tuning the driver for optimal performance.

After a one month development hiatus, Mesa 18.0 is due to be released today as the first major Mesa 3D release of 2018.

An independent contributor to Mesa has posted a set of patches for implementing NVIDIA's OpenGL conservative rasterization extensions.

While Mesa 18.0 should finally be out on Friday as the major quarterly update to the Mesa 3D drivers, Mesa 17.3.7 is out today and it's a rather big update for being just another point release to last month's 17.3 series.

Nearly one and a half months since Mesa 18.0-RC4 and nearly one month since last seeing any Git activity on the "18.0" Mesa Git branch, it's finally been updated today with the availability of Mesa 18.0-RC5.

Last week the release candidate of Mesa 17.3.7 was issued with more than 50 patches queued. That count grew more over the weekend resulting in an additional release candidate.

Earlier this year work on the "Chai" open-source Mali T700 GPU driver resumed with an aim to get a working Mesa driver for this "Midgard" graphics architecture. There's still a long battle ahead, but their NIR shader compiler is beginning to work.

While waiting for Mesa 18.0, the Mesa 17.3.7 point release will soon hit stable users of this open-source, user-space graphics stack.

Mesa 18.0's delay of more than one month and without any new release candidate came while the open-source Intel developers were hunkered down to clear the remaining blocker bugs.

Timothy Arceri of Valve's open-source Linux GPU driver team is out with his latest set of patches to further enhance the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver.

Mesa 18.0 had been due for release around mid-February, but that didn't happen and there hasn't even been a release candidate in more than one month.