The NVK driver has been written almost entirely from scratch using the new official headers from NVIDIA. Mesa translates specifications to vendor-specific graphics hardware drivers. The long-term hope is for NVK to be for NVIDIA hardware what RADV is to AMD hardware.

Microsoft’s latest contribution to Mesa is an EGL implementation that changes Mesa’s WGL front-end code to allow a Windows EGL implementation with a WGL driver for EGL. This Windows EGL support is merged for next quarter’s Mesa 21.3 release.

Beginning with Mesa 20.2 is OpenGL 4.5 support for LLVMpipe, the LLVM-based software rasterizer built as a Gallium3D driver. This succeeded LLVMpipe for years being limited to OpenGL 3.3. While the OpenGL 4.5 support has been enabled for weeks, The Khronos Group has now officially confirmed its implementation.

A libre-licensed software implementation of Vulkan has started up again. Originally started in c++ in 2017, for a reimplementation Rust has been chosen for its concurrency and memory-safety features, and Rust’s LLVM support makes it highly portable. With OpenGL having both llvmpipe and MesaGL for fallback and testing purposes, it seems strange that there does not exist a corresponding Reference Implementation for Vulkan: the only implementations available are in hardware, making it extremely challenging for anyone considering entering the market. Kazan helps fill that gap. Sponsorship of this entirely libre-licensed project welcomed.

After informing us last week about the availability of the Release Candidate (RC) version of the first point release of Mesa 13.0.0, as well as about Mesa 13.0.1’s upcoming launch on November 13, 2016, Collabora’s Emil Velikov released the final version today.

If you’ve been looking for OpenCL Docker using Beignet and Mesa, look no further. Rex Tsai on Github has a repository for you.

The biggest new feature of Mesa 13.0.0 is OpenGL 4.4 and OpenGL 4.5 capability. Equally big news includes OpenGL ES 3.2 support for Intel Skylake or later, OpenGL ES 3.1 support for Intel Haswell, Windows-DRI support to the GLX component, as well as KHR_no_config_context and EGL_KHR_debug support for EGL component. The Mesa EGL interface also received support for EGL_MESA_platform_surfaceless.

Mesa 11.0.3–according to the internal release notes–is a major bugfix release that resolves the KDE and Weston regressions that have been introduced in the previous release of the software, Mesa 11.0.2. Additionally, Mesa 3D Graphics Library 11.0.3 has a great number of patches for EGL and includes numerous bugfixes, especially for the Intel i830, Intel i915, Intel i965, RadeonSI, and Nouveau graphics drivers, as well as various under-the-hood improvements. “Mesa 11.0.3 is now available. In the current release we have a bunch of EGL patches, mangledGL build fixes and a healthy amount of driver bugfixes - RadeonSI, Nouveau, Intel i915 and i965,” says Emil Velikov, software release engineer for Collabora. “Last but not least, the KDE/Weston regression introduced with 11.0.2 has also been resolved.”

Intel shared plans early on that they want OpenGL ES 3.0 for Mesa by early 2013 with the next Mesa release. OpenGL ES 3.0 has a lot of new features over the aging OpenGL ES 2.0 specification, which makes it a really worthwhile upgrade. As part of this, Intel has been working on ETC2 texture compression and other functionality for this open-source Linux graphics driver. Ian Romanick of Intel has now shared on the Mesa mailing list that in the coming days he will begin to post the GLES3 patches for review and then merge them into mainline Mesa.

Two years ago Zack Rusin branched Mesa and called it Clover. Intended to provide OpenCL over Mesa, the work has been stalled for many months. A renewed interest in progressing work on Clover is now underway.