Canonical's Timo Aaltonen announced today that the recently released Mesa 18.1 graphics stack is now available for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) users.

Implementing OpenGL 3.1 with ARB_compatibility on RadeonSI, r600, NV50, NVC0, Softpipe, LLVMpipe, and SVGA graphics drivers, the Mesa 18.1 graphics stack series debuted on May 18, 2018, with support for new OpenGL extensions, including GL_EXT_semaphore, GL_EXT_semaphore_fd, GL_ARB_bindless_texture, and GL_ARB_transform_feedback_overflow_query.

Additionally, it adds support for the GL_EXT_shader_framebuffer_fetch and GL_EXT_shader_framebuffer_fetch_non_coherent extension for the Intel i965 OpenGL graphics driver, support for the GL_KHR_blend_equation_advanced extension for the RadeonSI graphics driver, and enables disk shader cache support for the Intel i965 OpenGL graphics driver by default.

Mesa 18.1.1 now available for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

Canonical has always backported new Mesa releases to its supported Ubuntu Linux operating systems, and developer Timo Aaltonen informed the community today that the latest Mesa 18.1.1 graphics stack is now available in the x-updates PPA (Personal Package Archive) for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) users to add an extra layer of gaming performance.

According to Timo Aaltonen, the Ubuntu team is also working on backporting the Mesa 18.0.5 graphics stack to the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system series, which uses the older Mesa 17.2.8 graphics stack, making upgrades smoother for those who would want to move to Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver), which was released with the Mesa 18.0.0 graphics stack.

"We first need to make sure 18.04 gets Mesa 18.0.5 (which is the last of the series, so no version bumps expected until the backport from 18.10) along with an updated libglvnd which bumps the Breaks/Replaces on old package versions to ensure that xenial -> bionic upgrade will go smoothly once 18.0.5 is backported to xenial, which will, in fact, be in -proposed soon," explained Timo Aaltonen.

Canonical is currently working on launching the first point release of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver), which is currently scheduled for July 26, 2018, and will be shipping with an updated graphics stack based on Mesa 18.1.1 or later. But, existing Ubuntu 18.04 LTS users can install Mesa 18.1.1 right now via the "Ubuntu-X" team PPA by running the following commands in the Terminal app.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-x-swat/updates

sudo apt update && sudo apt dist-upgrade