It's coming soon to a GNU/Linux distro near you

Sep 5, 2017 19:00 GMT  ·  By

Collabora's Emil Velikov is pleased to announce the release and general availability of the Mesa 17.2 graphics stack for GNU/Linux operating systems, which is a major version adding lots of improvements.

Mesa 17.2 has been in development for the past several weeks, during which it received no less than six Release Candidate (RC) snapshots, which implemented all the goodies that many Linux users will soon be able to enjoy on their personal computers, especially if they're gamers.

"The release consists of 3300 commits from approximately 130 developers," said Emil Velikov. "Feature wise, this release mainly focuses on hardware driver improvements, although common code paths has also seen some love. For example, the XvMC and OMX state trackers now work with DRI3, EGL has support for modifiers."

Highlights of Mesa 17.2

Highlights of the Mesa 17.2 graphics stack includes performance improvements for both the Intel ANV and AMD RADV Vulkan drivers, implementation of the OpenGL 4.5 API, though some of the included drivers won't support all of its features, as well as enhancements for the RadeonSI and Nouveau drivers.

Numerous bugs were addressed in the Mesa 17.2 series, improving support for many popular games. Among these, we can mention Europa Universalis IV, The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings, DOOM 2016 (Wine), Total War: Warhammer, and Serious Sam Fusion. The Google Earth and Chromium apps also received improvements, as well as the Wayland display server.

Similar to the new Linux kernel branches, new major Mesa releases are considered development versions, which means that OS integrators and end users should wait until the first maintenance update, in this case Mesa 17.2.1, get out before they attempt to install Mesa 17.2 on their PCs.

But, if you don't care, you can download the Mesa 17.2.0 source tarball right now from our website and compile it on your favorite GNU/Linux distro. Many popular Linux OSes will soon deploy the Mesa 17.2 graphics stack on their repositories, and Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) is launching next month with Mesa 17.2.