At this week's Linux Plumbers Conference, David Airlie began talking about the possibility of a vendor-neutral compute stack across Intel, Radeon, and NVIDIA GPU platforms that could potentially take on NVIDIA's CUDA dominance.

Mesa release manager Emil Velikov has announced the latest weekly release candidate of the upcoming Mesa 18.3.

For those sticking to the Mesa stable release train, Mesa 18.2.5 is now available ahead of the Mesa 18.3 quarterly feature release due out in the weeks ahead.

It's now been nearly one year since longtime Nouveau contributor Karol Herbst joined Red Hat where one of his big projects has been working on OpenCL support for this open-source NVIDIA driver by bringing up NIR/SPIR-V support and making the necessary improvements for allowing OpenCL kernels to be represented in that IR commonly used by the Mesa drivers. The work still isn't yet in Mesa Git, but Karol this week sent out his newest patches.

Being well into the Mesa 18.3 feature freeze and that quarterly update to these open-source OpenGL/Vulkan drivers due out in about two weeks, here is a look at all of the new features and changes you can expect to find with this big update.

It was just yesterday that the AMD Zen L3 thread pinning was dropped from Mesa due to that optimization not panning out as intended for benefiting the new AMD processors with the open-source Linux graphics driver stack. Lead Mesa hacker Marek Olšák is already out with a new Zen tuning implementation that may deliver on the original optimization goal.

It was just a few months back that the Mesa/RadeonSI open-source AMD Linux driver stack received Zen tuning for that CPU microarchitecture's characteristics. But now AMD's Marek Olšák is going back to the drawing board to work on a new approach for Zen tuning.

While most Linux gamers these days are mesmerized by DXVK for mapping Direct3D 10/11 to Vulkan for better handling Windows games on Linux, for those with older Direct3D 9 era games there is still the Gallium Nine initiative for D3D9 implemented as a Mesa Gallium state tracker. A new patch series posted this weekend will make that Gallium Nine experience even better.

The second weekly release candidate of Mesa 18.3 is now available for testing of these open-source OpenGL / Vulkan drivers.

Published back in September was some Mesa RadeonSI tuning for AMD Zen CPUs. That tuning to pin the application thread and driver execution thread to the same L3 cache benefits the Zen micro-architecture with its multiple core complexes (CCX). That code was merged a short time later unconditionally but it looks like that behavior needs to be refined for delivering maximum performance.

Wayland founder Kristian Høgsberg Kristensen who has been on Google's Chrome OS graphics team the past few years is continuing to help advance the open-source Qualcomm Adreno graphics support.

Following last week's Mesa 18.3 branching, the first release candidate to this final quarterly feature update of 2018 is now available.

Mesa 18.3 feature development is officially over with the code having been branched from Git master earlier today. Mesa 18.3-RC1 should be out soon to kick off the weekly release candidates while now Mesa Git master starts what will become Mesa 19.0.

The branching of Mesa 18.3 is imminent and expected to happen anytime now. The Mesa developers of the different drivers have been very busy in merging their last-minute feature work for this final quarterly feature update to end out 2018.

The Zink Gallium3D driver that is implementing OpenGL over Vulkan and using Mesa's Gallium3D driver infrastructure is beginning to run more games, work under Wayland, and more. There still is a long road ahead but at least it's becoming usable for early testers and those wishing to experiment with this project.

Prolific open-source AMD hacker Marek Olšák has sent out a revised patch enabling support for the yet-to-be-released Raven 2 APUs within the RadeonSI Gallium3D.

As a big win for Radeon Linux gamers using the RADV and enjoying Steam Play (Proton) or Wine games and making use of the DXVK library, this open-source AMD Vulkan driver has merged support for transform feedback!

With the Freedreno Gallium3D driver's reverse-engineered, open-source 3D/OpenGL driver support for Qualcomm Adreno hardware in pretty darn good shape these days even for the latest-generation Adreno 600 series, the developers have begun working on more optimizations -- including a new effort trying to reduce the OpenGL driver's overhead.

With just one week of feature development remaining for the in-development Mesa 18.3, the race is on for landing the remaining feature work ahead of this next quarterly Mesa3D stable version.

Intel open-source developer Dylan Baker has laid out a proposed release schedule for the upcoming Mesa 18.3 quarterly feature release.

The Panfrost open-source, community-driven, reverse-engineered graphics driver for ARM Mali graphics processors continues panning out pretty well.

Mesa 18.2.3 is out today as the latest point release to the Mesa 18.2 stable series. Notable to this point release are several bug fixes and workarounds to benefit Steam Play / Wine (and the Valve downstream Proton) and various new games being brought up there thanks in part to DXVK.

Igalia's Juan Suarez Romero as the Mesa 18.2 series release manager is putting the finishing touches on the 18.2.3 point release to benefit Steam Play / Proton / Wine games.

When it comes to open-source ARM graphics drivers, the Raspberry Pi / VC4 effort and Freedreno continue to be the two best examples of fully open-source graphics driver coverage including 3D support. Freedreno has been attracting contributions from Qualcomm / CodeAurora in what started out as solely a community reverse-engineered effort and with the latest-generation Adreno 600 series hardware the open-source support is in great shape.

With the imminent Linux 4.19 kernel release there is VCN JPEG decode support within the AMDGPU DRM driver for use with Raven Ridge APUs. The accompanying user-space patches for the Radeon Gallium3D code have now been posted for making this functionality work on the Linux desktop with these Zen+Vega APUs.

With this weekend's release of Vulkan 1.1.88 stealing the show was the Vulkan transform feedback capability to allow projects like DXVK to support Direct3D's Stream Output functionality. But besides VK_EXT_transform_feedback, there are other extensions also being worked on for Mesa ANV / RADV Vulkan driver coverage.

Prolific Radeon Mesa contributor Marek Olšák of AMD started off his Sunday by posting another set of RadeonSI driver patches.

Back in June there was the initial Whiskey Lake support for the Intel DRM kernel driver ahead of the Whiskey Lake and Amber Lake announcement from late August. Now there is formal Whiskey Lake support for Intel's Mesa code.

Mesa 18.2.2 is out this morning as the second point release to the Q3'2018 stable release series.

It's time for another two-week Mesa 18.2 point release, which is v18.2.2 and preparing for release on Friday.