Collabora's Emil Velikov announced earlier today, December 7, the immediate availability for download and testing of the third RC (Release Candidate) build of the upcoming Mesa 11.1.0 3D graphics library for GNU/Linux operating systems.

Looking at the internal release notes, which we've attached at the end of the article for reference, Mesa 11.1.0 RC3 is yet another bugfix release that addresses over 30 issues reported by users of discovered by the Mesa developers on various core components since the previous Release Candidate build of the software.

The third Release Candidate build of Mesa 11.1.0 includes improvements for the Intel i965 graphics drivers, various GLAPI updates, such as the addition of a GetPointervKHR to the ES dispatch, multiple enhancements to the Radeon r600 drivers, several fixes for the nv50 video drivers, as well as minor fixes for the RadeonSI and Radeon drivers.

Mesa 11.1.0 should be released by the end of 2015

Among some of the most important changes, we can mention better vl_video_buffer_formats support for RGBX, support for LLVM 3.7 or previous version on Radeon Fiji, a workaround for the empty geometry shader on r600, removal of the len argument from the _mesa_shader_debug() function, and rename of GroupStackDepth to CurrentGroup.

If you're curious to know what exactly has been changed in this release, we strongly recommend to study the changelog attached below, otherwise, you can download the Mesa 11.1.0 Release Candidate 3 sources right now via Softpedia and start compiling the software by hand on your GNU/Linux operating system.

However, we have to warn you that this is a pre-release version of the upcoming Mesa 11.1.0 3D Graphics Library, which includes incomplete features and bugs. Please do not install this version and any other development release of Mesa on your production operating system. The final release of Mesa 11.1.0 should be announced by the end of 2015.