Developers' Planned Changes Still Coming To Mesa 13.1 / Mesa 17.0

Earlier this week I wrote about a release schedule coming out for Mesa 13.1 that culminates with this next big Mesa update being out in February. Some Mesa developers have now shared the work they still hope to see in this next release.

- In the earlier article I brought up the matter of Mesa release manager Emil Velikov still referring to this next version as "Mesa 13.1" while there was the recent discussion of changing Mesa's versioning to be date-based. Thus in response to that mailing list thread there are more developers now giving their support for this next version to be Mesa 17.0, rather than Mesa 13.1. We'll see what happens there. Emil commented a few minutes ago, "Will check with the versioning scheme thread in a day or so. Might poke some distro maintainers for to collect some feedback (mostly checking for objections)."

- AMD's Nicolai Hähnle shared that he hopes to be able to get the OpenGL Conformance Test Suite (GL CTS) failures down to zero, but currently are at 18 failures preventing them from passing all the OpenGL 4.5 tests. This might not happen though as they may end up needing clarifications from Khronos about the behavior of some elements, which could take some time for getting a vetted response. Not all of these failures are bound to the RadeonSI Gallium3D code but some AMDGPU LLVM changes are also needed.

- Christian Gmeiner expressed hope for seeing the Etnaviv Gallium3D driver merged. Earlier this week the Etnaviv Mesa/Gallium3D changes were posted for review.

- Collabora's Timothy Arceri expressed hope for seeing the Mesa on-disk shader cache land for Mesa 13.1~17.0, which currently is just hooked up for the Intel driver. Arceri sent out the latest on-disk shader cache patches just a few days ago and he's held up waiting on code reviews for being able to merge the massive patch-set. Aside from Linux gamers being interested in this for better performance and shorter load times, he also mentioned that Valve is interested in seeing the code merged too, for obvious reasons.

That's it so far of the latest talk about further work still desired for Mesa 13.1~17.0, on top of all the features/changes already in Git the past few months. Stay tuned for some Mesa feature overviews as the February release draws closer, plus, plenty of OpenGL and Vulkan benchmarks. Speaking of Vulkan, still looking like RADV is humming along for this release with AMD still having not opened up their proprietary Vulkan driver code. Another disappointment, this on the Intel side, is the Haswell FP64 support hasn't landed yet either for being able to march past OpenGL 3.3 compliance.