14 DAY TRIAL // On September 20, Collabora's Emil Velikov released the eighth maintenance release of the old-stable Mesa 3D Graphics Library 10.6 branch, despite the fact that Mesa 11.0.0 is out for a week now and users are urged to move to it as soon as possible.
According to the internal changelog, which we have attached at the end of the article for reference, Mesa 10.6.8 brings numerous improvements to the Nouveau video driver for Nvidia GPUs (Graphics Processing Units).
Among these, we can mention improved creation of scanout buffers, implement color resolve for MSAA, addresses an issue with the maximum width and height checks in NV30 sifm code, and removes support for the BGRA4 format.
Multisample anti-aliasing (MSAA) is now disabled by default for Nouveau unless it is requested by NV30_MAX_MSAA, a full shader colormask is now always emitted for NVC0, and the maximum texture buffer size has been updated for 128M elements.
Additionally, Mesa 10.6.8 fixes issues for Intel i965, LLVMpipe, and GBM (Graphics Buffer Manager), such as saturation errors when joining registers for Intel i965, as well as the ability to convert double to long long instead of unsigned long long in LLVMpipe.
"Mesa 10.6.8 is now available. With this release we have mostly Nouveau fixes, although we have the odd i965, llvmpipe (big endian) and gbm bugfix," says Emil Velikov, software release engineer at Collabora.
Gallivm received some attention, too
The eighth maintenance release of Mesa 3D Graphics Library 10.6 comes with many other improvements, among which we can mention the ability to avoid integer overflows with buffers that are equal or bigger than 512MB, a workaround for LLVM PR23628 in Gallivm, and better texture compression support on big-endian systems.
NoFramePointerElim is no longer used with LLVM 3.7 for Gallivm, GBM (Graphics Buffer Manager)'s bo format can now be converted to the fourcc format during import of dma-buf, hardware registers are no longer reswizzled for Intel i965, and Mesa will no longer fall back to 16F if 32F is requested.
Last but not least, Mesa 10.6.8 will no longer allow for wrong type setters for matrix uniforms, it temporarily supports ARB_texture_stencil8 for blits in Intel i965, it is capable of passing the type to _mesa_uniform_matrix as a glsl_base_type, and fills Intel i965's src_reg type using the constructor type parameter. Download Mesa 10.6.8 right now from Softpedia.