What’s Even Happening

Where does the time go?

I’m not sure, but I’m making the most of it. As we all know, the Mesa 21.3 release cycle is well underway, primarily to enable me to jam an increasingly ludicrous number of bug fixes in before the final tarball ships.

But is it possible that I’m doing other things too?

Why yes. Yes it is.

CI

We all like CI. It helps prevent us from footgunning, even when we’re totally sure that our patches are exactly what the codebase needs.

That’s why I decided to add GL4.6 CI runs over the past day or so. No more will tests be randomly fixed or failed with my commits!

Unless they’re part of the Khronos Confidential GL Test Suite, of course, but we don’t talk about that one.

Intrepid readers will note that there’s now a file in the repo which lists exactly how many failures there are on lavapipe, so now everyone knows how many thousands of tests are doing the opposite.

Rendering

A new Vulkan spec was released this week and it included something I’ve been excited about for a while: KHR_dynamic_rendering. This extension is going to let me cut down on some CPU overhead, and so some time ago I wrote the lavapipe implementation to get a feel for it.

Surprisingly, this means that lavapipe is now the only mesa driver implementing it, though I don’t expect that to be the case for long.

I’m looking forward to seeing more projects switch to this, since let’s be honest, nobody ever liked renderpasses anyway.