Mesa 7.5 Release Notes / 17 July 2009

Mesa 7.5 is a new development release. People who are concerned with stability and reliability should stick with the 7.4.x branch or wait for Mesa 7.5.1.

The main new feature of Mesa 7.5 is the Gallium3D infrastructure.

Mesa 7.5 implements the OpenGL 2.1 API, but the version reported by glGetString(GL_VERSION) depends on the particular driver being used. Some drivers don't support all the features required in OpenGL 2.1.

See the Compiling/Installing page for prerequisites for DRI hardware acceleration.

Note that the Mesa project is no longer using odd/even version numbers to indicate development/stable releases. The so-called development releases have been fairly stable. If you're especially concerned with stability you should probably look for "point" releases such as 7.5.1 which will be a bug-fix release.

MD5 checksums

tbd

New features

• Gallium3D - this is the new architecture for OS-independent and API-independent 3D drivers. Gallium3D is intended for GPUs that fully support vertex/fragment shaders. The Gallium3D drivers currently included are:
  • softpipe - a software/reference driver
  • i915 - Intel 915/945 driver
  • Cell - IBM/Sony/Toshiba Cell processor driver
  • nouveau (for NVIDIA GPUs) and R300 for (AMD/ATI R300). PLEASE NOTE: these drivers are incomplete and still under development. It's probably NOT worthwhile to report any bugs unless you have patches.
• GL_ARB_framebuffer_object extension (software drivers, i965 driver)
• Reworked two-sided stencil support. This allows a driver to support all three variations of two-sided stencil including GL_ATI_separate_stencil, GL_EXT_stencil_two_side and OpenGL 2.0
• GL_EXT_vertex_array_bgra extension (software drivers, i965 driver)
• GL_NV_texture_env_combine4 extension (software drivers, i965/i915 drivers)
• GL_EXT_texture_swizzle extension (software drivers, i965 driver)
• Updated SPARC assembly optimizations (David S. Miller)
• Initial support for separate compilation units in GLSL compiler.
• Increased max number of generic GLSL varying variables to 16 (formerly 8).
• GLSL linker now detects when too many varying variables are used.
• Optimize-out redundant glMaterial and glShadeModel calls in display lists
• Fixed gl_TextureMatrix[i][j] array indexing bug in GLSL compiler.

Bug fixes

• Lots of i965 driver bug fixes
• Fixed some GLSL preprocessor bugs
• GLSL: continue inside of a for-loop didn't work

Changes

• Remove support for GL_SGIX_shadow, GL_SGIX_shadow_ambient and GL_SGIX_depth_texture extensions. Superseded by the ARB versions.
• Omitted some old Mesa demos from the release tarballs, added some others.