Features To Be Found In Mesa 10.0

Mesa 10.0 will hopefully be released by the end of November and with it will come plenty of new features and improvements to the open-source Linux graphics drivers.

While Mesa has traditionally been on a six-month release cycle, Mesa 10.0 will be the first under the new three-month cycle strategy for pushing out driver updates faster to Linux desktop users.

As the Mesa 10.0 release is branched and the final release comes in sight, there will be plenty more coverage on Phoronix, but already some highlights for this Mesa 9.2 successor include:

- OpenGL 3.2 support and OpenGL 3.3 support. In Mesa 9.2 there's just OpenGL 3.1 compliance but this next Mesa release will bring support for both the 3.2 and 3.3 Khronos specifications in core Mesa. Right now, however, the only Mesa driver taking full advantage of this support is the Intel DRI driver and for Ivy Bridge / Haswell hardware you can have OpenGL 3.3 open-source compliance right now.

- Support for some OpenGL 4.x extensions, but OpenGL 4.0 compliance is still a long ways off.

- Haiku OS support improvements.

- There's plenty of performance improvements to be found... Too many to list individually. For at least some workloads, you should be able to find performance improvements for Nouveau, Intel, R600 Radeon, and the RadeonSI Gallium3D drivers. Numerous Phoronix articles have already highlighted performance changes, but more will be on the way as the release is closer where we can have a more solid look at the performance changes.

- OpenCL ICD support for the Clover state tracker, among other OpenCL/GPGPU compute improvements.

- Many bug-fixes and dozens/hundreds of smaller improvements. The RadeonSI (HD 7000 series and newer) driver has also improved a lot.

There's also a lot yet-to-be-merged work like the OpenMAX state tracker or even the Mir display driver support.

Stay tuned for more Mesa 10.0 articles in the coming weeks.