Mesa 19.2 is released with support for AMD Navi GPUs
Support for the AMD "Navi" GPUs released this summer as well as some upcoming AMD GPUs is the big highlight in the latest version of the GNU/Linux graphics stack used by all the free graphics drivers. This, together with kernel support in the newly released 5.3 series Linux Kernels, means that it is finally possible to buy these GPUs and use them on a GNU/Linux machine without having to use git development versions of everything.
Mesa's "glxgears" test application with a HUD overlay
We asked AMD employed Mesa developer Marek Olšák what the big news items in Mesa 19.2 would be when Mesa 19.2 rc2 was released and he gave this comment:
"Navi10 and Navi14 are the biggest highlights, other than that, 19.2.0.html contains the list of new extensions"
He would not elaborate on what kind of features and specifications the mysterious "Navi14" GPU chip will have.
"sorry, it's an unreleased chip, so I'm not allowed to say what it is"
He did, however, mention that Navi14 will be based on "gfx10" - just like Navi10.
Mesa release manager Dylan Baker had this to say about the release:
"I'd like to announce the availability of 19.2.0 final. It's taken a little longer than we'd normally hope for, but we're here now. Things are looking pretty good overall, and we've seen a nice slow down in the number of fixes coming in, which I like.
Most of patches new in this release are just release-infastructure changes from me, but we've also got some changes to the build system, turnip, radv, android, and intel and amd common code."
There are some interesting changes on the Intel side too even though they are not indicated by the release-announcement. The Intel OpenGL driver has finally gotten OpenGL 4.6 support. This is something the AMD RadeonSI driver does not yet have.
Virgl has also been greatly improved. This is a graphics driver for virtual machines running in QEMU. This release has virglrenderer support for copy transfers which gives 3D applications running in virtual machines a huge performance boost. Steam games and real-world applications will run 4-5 times faster using Mesa 19.2 paired with the latest Virgl renderer library while synthetic benchmarks run close to 10x faster.
The short-log for Mesa 19.2 since the last release candidate is as follows:
- docs: Update bug report URLs for the gitlab migration
- docs: Add the maximum implemented Vulkan API version in 19.2 rel notes
- anv: fix descriptor limits on gen8
- tu: Set up glsl types.
- radv: Add workaround for hang in The Surge 2.
- cherry-ignore: Add patches
- rehardcode from origin/master to upstream/master
- bin/get-pick-list: use --oneline=pretty instead of --oneline
- docs: Add release notes for 19.2.0
- Bump version for 19.2.0 final
- gl: drop incorrect pkg-config file for glvnd
- meson: re-add incorrect pkg-config files with GLVND for backward compatibility
- util: fix SSE-version needed for double opcodes
- i965: support AYUV/XYUV for external import only
- gallium/osmesa: Fix the inability to set no context as current.
- nir/algebraic: Do not apply late DPH optimization in vertex processing stages
- nir/repair_ssa: Replace the unreachable check with the phi builder
- bin/get-pick-list.sh: sha1 commits can be smaller than 8 chars
- intel: Increase Gen11 compute shader scratch IDs to 64.
- amd: add more PCI IDs for Navi14
- ac/addrlib: fix chip identification for Vega10, Arcturus, Raven2, Renoir
- android: mesa: revert "Enable asm unconditionally"
- android: anv: libmesa_vulkan_common: add libmesa_util static dependency
- intel/fs: fix SHADER_OPCODE_CLUSTER_BROADCAST for SIMD32
- intel/nir: do not apply the fsin and fcos trig workarounds for consts
- radv: fix loading 64-bit GS inputs
- radv/gfx10: fix VK_KHR_pipeline_executable_properties with NGG GS
- egl: check for NULL value like eglGetSyncAttribKHR does
The latest Mesa version can be downloaded from the mesa.freedesktop.org/archive/. It is a quite large compile so you are likely better off waiting until your favorite distribution adds it to their repositories.
published 2019-09-27 - last edited 2020-02-05
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