Mesa 8.0 to support OpenGL 3.0

For those that don't know, Mesa is an open source implementation of the OpenGL API. It's a key component of the open source graphics stack that powers Linux desktops, as well as many other operating systems. Mesa is the default OpenGL implementation for most Linux distributions and is what makes hardware accelerated OpenGL work "out of the box" on those systems. For this reason, the version number of OpenGL it supports is important if you are developing cross-platform OpenGL applications because it is the baseline version that you can target to get the widest audience.

The Mesa developers are currently preparing the next release.

The new release will bring performance improvements, support for OpenGL 3.0 and its sibling GLSL 1.3. It will also bring more features to the "LLVM pipe" software OpenGL driver which uses the LLVM compiler infrastructure to create a highly optimized CPU-powered OpenGL implementation.

If like me, you are a user of Ubuntu you should see the new Mesa included in the next release 12.04 LTS.