With the Mesa 17.3 branching being imminent, it's a very busy week for open-source graphics driver developers from all the major organizations as they try to land their last-minute improvements for this next quarterly and final Mesa stable update for 2017.

Landing in Mesa Git this morning ahead of the imminent 17.3 branching is support for OpenGL occlusion queries.

With Mesa 17.3 expected to be branched this weekend and this marking the end of feature development for this last stable Mesa series of 2017, the RADV Radeon Vulkan drivers in particular have been busy landing a lot of last minute code.

Mesa 17.2.3 is now available as the latest bi-weekly update for this current stable driver series.

The Etnaviv Gallium3D driver that provides reverse-engineered, open-source graphics support for Vivante graphics hardware is almost to exposing OpenGL 2.0.

At the end of September initial Meson support landed in Mesa while hitting 17.3-devel Git now is support for more of the Mesa drivers under this new build system.

Feature development for Mesa 17.3 will be over soon in order to get this quarterly update to Mesa3D shipping next month.

The initial "VC5" Gallium3D driver for next-generation Broadcom graphics hardware has been merged into mainline Mesa.

Now being into Q4, I've been meaning to run some fresh Mesa Git development statistics to see how this year is pacing for this important piece of the open-source graphics ecosystem and Linux desktop.

The new OpenGL extension MESA_tile_raster_order proposed by Eric Anholt at Broadcom has now been merged to the Khronos registry.

For fans of the 2012 video game Spec Ops: The Line that was brought to Linux in 2015, this Unreal Engine 3 powered title should run faster with the newest Mesa.

It's not yet merged to mainline Mesa, but Eric Anholt of Broadcom has spent the past week wiring up more of the OpenGL functionality for the in-development VC5 driver stack for the next-generation Broadcom graphics hardware.

Rejoice as S3TC (S3 Texture Compression) support now resides within Mesa Git following its patent expiry on Monday.

As expected, Mesa 17.2.2 was released today by Igalia's Juan Suarez Romero.

As mentioned last week, the S3TC patent has now expired. With the S3 Texture Compression no longer encumbered by a patent, support for it is being added to mainline Mesa.

For those not comfortable riding Mesa Git, Mesa 17.2.2 is set to be released early next week as the newest stable update for the open-source 3D graphics driver stack.

For fans of the Outlast first-person survival horror game that was released in 2013 and brought to Linux in 2015, you may get better performance now if using the Mesa drivers thanks to the OpenGL threading being flipped on.

Landing in Mesa 17.3-dev Git yesterday is initial support for the Meson build system! Initially, this Meson build support just works for the Intel ANV and Radeon RADV Vulkan drivers.

Mesa 17.1.10 just hit the wire and is the last planned update for the Mesa 17.1 series.

J.A. Suarez Romero of Igalia is preparing Mesa 17.1.10 as the final point release for the Mesa 17.1 release stream.

A few months ago was a vibrant discussion about a Meson proposal for libdrm/Mesa while today the initial patches were posted in bringing a possible Meson build system port for Mesa.

The RadeonSI out-of-order rasterization support for RX Vega "GFX9" and Volcanic Islands GPUs has now landed in Mesa 17.3-devel Git.

As anticipated, Mesa 17.2.1 is now available for those wanting to use the latest stable point release of Mesa3D for the best, stable open-source 3D graphics user experience on Linux and other operating systems.

For those that have been waiting for the first point release of Mesa 17.2 before upgrading, the release candidate is out while the official build is slated for next week.

The mesa_glthread functionality has now been whitelisted for more Linux games.

Landing today within Mesa Git is a switchover for the AMDGPU winsys layer to using the new command submission (CS) API.

Mesa 17.1.9 is now available for those sticking to the 17.1 stable releases and aren't yet comfortable moving to the just-released Mesa 17.2.

Broadcom developer Eric Anholt who has long been working on the VC4 open-source graphics driver stack most well known for being used by the Raspberry Pi has begun working on a new driver stack, VC5, for a next-generation of Broadcom graphics hardware.

Mesa 17.2 is now officially available as the latest quarterly update to Mesa 3D after running a few weeks behind schedule.

Mesa 17.2 was supposed to be released earlier this month but the release process has been extended and we're now up to the sixth release candidate for testing.