After much waiting, the latest release of the Mesa graphics stack is out now with tons of improvements to lots of drivers for Linux users and for Linux gaming. The release announcement was very brief and to the point, mentioning to expect regular releases back on schedule from here on out.
Like each new release the developers mention that if you want stability you should stick with the previous release, or wait for the first point release to clear up anything that slipped through. Mesa 21.0.1 should be out in a couple of weeks.
From the official changelog for the technical folks this is what's been implemented with this release:
- GL_EXT_demote_to_helper_invocation on radeonsi
- GL_NV_compute_shader_derivatives on radeonsi
- EGL_MESA_platform_xcb
- Removed GL_NV_point_sprite for classic swrast.
- driconf: remove glx_disable_oml_sync_control, glx_disable_sgi_video_sync, and glx_disable_ext_buffer_age
- Removed support for loading DRI drivers older than Mesa 8.0, including all DRI1 support
- Add support for VK_VALVE_mutable_descriptor_type on RADV
- Removed classic OSMesa in favor of the newly improved gallium OSMesa
- VK_KHR_fragment_shading_rate on RADV (RDNA2 only)
- Freedreno a6xx exposes GL 3.3
- Classic swrast dri driver removed in favor of gallium swrast (llvmpipe or softpipe)
- Panfrost g31/g52/g72 exposes ES 3.0
- Panfrost t760+ exposes GL 3.1 (including on Bifrost)
- Sparse memory support on RADV
- Rapid packed math (16bit-vectorization) on RADV
There's also quite a lot of bug fixes.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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From the #wine channel on the GOL discord, I've seen a few instances where Mesa 21 was causing issues with certain big games, like Red Dead Redemption. A few folk migrated from Padoka to Kisak just to downgrade to Mesa 20 until 21 had better stability. It'll be good to see how that stability shapes up now it's released!
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There are also known issues with CS:GO Trust Factor, so if you're using AMDGPU, you may want to downgrade or avoid playing matchmaking until it's fixed: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/csgo-osx-linux/issues/2630
Last edited by Calinou on 12 March 2021 at 1:34 pm UTC
Last edited by Calinou on 12 March 2021 at 1:34 pm UTC
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Quoting: scaineFrom the #wine channel on the GOL discord, I've seen a few instances where Mesa 21 was causing issues with certain big games, like Red Dead Redemption. A few folk migrated from Padoka to Kisak just to downgrade to Mesa 20 until 21 had better stability. It'll be good to see how that stability shapes up now it's released!That's good to know, but pretty normal for new releases. Major Mesa releases always have this boilerplate:
"Mesa 21.0.0 is a new development release. People who are concerned with stability and reliability should stick with a previous release or wait for Mesa 21.0.1."
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Quoting: whizseQuoting: scaineFrom the #wine channel on the GOL discord, I've seen a few instances where Mesa 21 was causing issues with certain big games, like Red Dead Redemption. A few folk migrated from Padoka to Kisak just to downgrade to Mesa 20 until 21 had better stability. It'll be good to see how that stability shapes up now it's released!That's good to know, but pretty normal for new releases. Major Mesa releases always have this boilerplate:
"Mesa 21.0.0 is a new development release. People who are concerned with stability and reliability should stick with a previous release or wait for Mesa 21.0.1."
Yep - as Liam noted in the article. But I'm curious, given the issues people had with the release candidates in wine, how this particular release will shape up now it's out.
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Quoting: whizse"Mesa 21.0.0 is a new development release. People who are concerned with stability and reliability should stick with a previous release or wait for Mesa 21.0.1."
14 hours ago kisak ppa with support for 21.0.1 released:
-> https://launchpad.net/~kisak/+archive/ubuntu/kisak-mesa
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Quoting: KuJoQuoting: whizse"Mesa 21.0.0 is a new development release. People who are concerned with stability and reliability should stick with a previous release or wait for Mesa 21.0.1."
14 hours ago kisak ppa with support for 21.0.1 released:
-> https://launchpad.net/~kisak/+archive/ubuntu/kisak-mesa
Well, I did an upgrade and nothing happened. This led me to analyse the packages in Synaptic, only to realise that while my system was using the Kisak libDRM components, I was still on Pop_OS for mesa overall!! What the hell??
Turns out, Pop pin their graphics stack with a really high priority, so even if you add a PPA with higher version numbers, Pop will ignore it. No idea why they do this, but it's a pain to realise that adding a PPA to get a certain version of software might not actually give you that version of software. So regardless of the reasoning for this - I hate it.
Anyway, to fix, I need to create a new file called /etc/apt/preferences.d/kisak-pin-2000 with the following contents:
Package: *
Pin: release o=LP-PPA-kisak-kisak-mesa
Pin-Priority: 2000Big shout to this reddit thread for that information.
One dist-upgrade later and I have mesa 21. Phew!
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