Thanks to work done over the past few months by AMD's Marek Olšák on improving Mesa's OpenGL compatibility profile support and then today carried over the final mile by Valve's Timothy Arceri, Mesa 18.2 now exposes OpenGL 3.3 under the compatibility context.

Back in 2012 when talking with Gabe Newell of Valve about open-source/Linux challenges one of the topics he was awed about was patents encumbering the open-source graphics driver progress. Six years later, Timothy Arceri working on the Valve Linux graphics driver team has freed Mesa's ARB_texture_float support from being built conditionally due to these patent fears.

New Mesa release manager Dylan Baker has issued the second point release of the Mesa 18.1 series.

Mesa has been plumbed in to support the ARB_sample_locations OpenGL extension and is now exposed with the Nouveau NVC0 Gallium3D driver.

It was just days ago that the VirGL driver stack -- which is used for supporting OpenGL hardware acceleration within guest VMs that is passed onto the host's driver -- picked up FP64 support while now its latest addition is ARB_tessellation_shader support.

Earlier this month AMD's Marek Olšák posted RadeonSI patches for a scissor workaround affecting GFX9/Vega GPUs including Raven Ridge, which were based upon a RADV driver workaround already merged that helped affected games by up to ~11%. A revised version of that patch is now in Mesa 18.2 Git.

Keith Packard's patches for improving the Linux infrastructure around VR HMD devices have landed within the mainline Linux kernel as well as in X.Org Server 1.20, but for rounding out the work, there still are pending patches for the Mesa Vulkan drivers.

The Etnaviv Gallium3D driver for providing reverse-engineered, open-source 3D graphics driver support for Vivante graphics hardware is currently pursuing NIR intermediate representation support.

Mesa 18.0.5 is out as the latest point release for the Mesa 18.0 release from Q1'2018, but it also now marks the end of the series.

For those waiting until the first point release of a new Mesa series before updating, Mesa 18.1.1 is out to kick off June as the first update to Mesa 18.1.

It's always great having more open-source graphics driver improvements to kick off a new month. Marek has started the day by volleying 14 new RadeonSI patches.

Mesa 18.0.5 is the last planned point release for the Mesa 18.0 series that debuted at the end of March as the Q1'2018 release for Mesa3D.

Marek Olšák of AMD has landed the recently noted updates to the OpenGL compatibility profile support in Mesa 18.2.

The only developer from Imagination Technologies that was active in contributing to Mesa has left the company and is now working for Intel's open-source graphics team.

With the recent Mesa 18.1 release there is OpenGL 3.1 support with the ARB_compatibility context for the key Gallium3D drivers, but Marek Olšák at AMD continues working on extending that functionality under the OpenGL compatibility context mode.

Following the news from earlier this month that FreeDesktop.org would move its infrastructure to Gitlab, the Mesa3D project has begun the process of adopting this Git-centered software.

While Mesa 18.1 just officially shipped last week, Mesa 18.2 as next quarter's open-source 3D OpenGL/Vulkan graphics driver stack update is scheduled for release in mid-August.

Samuel Pitoiset of Valve's Linux graphics driver team has been working on support for 32-bit GPU pointers for user SGPRs as his latest performance enhancement for this open-source Radeon Vulkan driver.

First time Mesa release manager Dylan Baker has managed to release Mesa 18.1 on time as the Q2'2018 quarterly update to this OpenGL/Vulkan driver stack.

The in-development Panfrost reverse-engineered, open-source driver for supporting ARM Mali T700 series graphics is now much more capable thanks to work carried out on their "half-way" Gallium3D driver in recent weeks.

Mesa 18.1 might be out this weekend but for those riding the Mesa 18.0 stable release series for now, Mesa 18.0.4 is the latest point release.

What was developed as the VC5 Gallium3D driver is now renamed to V3D and enabled by default in new Mesa 18.2 builds.

In addition to being able to plot the frames per second, CPU usage, and many other possible sensor outputs, the Gallium3D Heads-Up Display (HUD) is now capable of showing the frametime while gaming.

While Mesa 18.1 is expected for release this week, those riding the Mesa 18.0 stable series will also have an 18.0.4 point release coming in the next few days.

It's almost one year since the release of OpenGL 4.6 and while there is support outside of the Mesa tree, mainline Mesa still doesn't support this latest OpenGL revision due to the holdups around SPIR-V ingestion support.

While Mesa 18.0 debuted just about one and a half months ago, the fourth and final release candidate of Mesa 18.1 is now available for testing as the next quarterly feature installment to these primarily OpenGL/Vulkan open-source drivers.

In addition to the potentially performance-doubling AMD Kaveri fix landing yesterday in Mesa 18.2 Git, also hitting this next version of Mesa is Enhanced Quality Anti-Aliasing (EQAA) support for Radeon GCN graphics processors.

When using the latest Git/development code of Mesa 18.2 on Kaveri APUs you may find up to a 2x increase in performance if you are using the AMDGPU DRM driver rather than the default Radeon DRM driver.

Libdrm 2.4.92 is now available as the newest version of the Mesa DRM library that most notably sits between the Mesa drivers and the Linux kernel Direct Rendering Manager code.

While Mesa 18.1 is coming soon, the current stable release series for now is Mesa 18.0 with the 18.0.3 being released today as the newest point release.