Today, May 30, 2016, Collabora's Emil Velikov announced that the major Mesa 12.0.0 3D Graphics Library software is open for development, and a first RC (Release Candidate) build is now available for testing.
According to the official release schedule published by Mr. Velikov a month ago, this first Release Candidate of Mesa 3D 12.0.0 was expected to arrive sometime around the date of May 20, followed one week later by the second RC build, on May 27. But it looks like the development cycle was pushed back for a week due to various facts.
"The plan is to have one release candidate every Friday, until the final release on June 10th or June 17th, 2016," said Emil Velikov, Software Release Engineer, Collabora. "The expectation is that the 11.2 branch will remain alive with bi-weekly releases until after 12.0.1 release."
Therefore, it looks now that Mesa 12.0.0 3D Graphics Library Release Candidate 2 is coming this Friday, on June 3, the RC3 build should be released one week later, on June 10, and the final version might hit the streets on June 17, 2016. As noted above by Mr. Velikov, if things go smoothly, we should get Mesa 3D 12.0.0 final on June 10.
Mesa 3D 12.0.0 RC1 is available for download
Until then, you can now download the source archive of the Mesa 12.0.0 3D Graphics Library Release Candidate 1 build and compile it for your GNU/Linux distribution if you want to help with testing and reporting of bugs. This first development milestone includes a huge number of improvements and bug fixes.
Among some of the biggest features coming to the final Mesa 3D Graphics Library 12.0.0 release are p64/va64 for Broadwell and later, OpenGL 4.2 support, a bunch of improvements for the Intel i965 graphics driver, as well as the usual enhancements for various other supported drivers, including Radeon, RadeonSI, and Nouveau.
