# Mesa 8.0 Release Notes / February 9, 2012

Mesa 8.0 is a new development release. People who are concerned with stability and reliability should stick with a previous release or wait for Mesa 8.0.1.

Mesa 8.0 implements the OpenGL 3.0 API, but the version reported by glGetString(GL_VERSION) depends on the particular driver being used. Some drivers don’t support all the features required in OpenGL 3.0.

See the Compiling/Installing page for prerequisites for DRI hardware acceleration.

## MD5 checksums

    3516fea6c28ce4a0fa9759e4894729a1  MesaLib-8.0.tar.gz
    1a5668fe72651a670611164cefc703b2  MesaLib-8.0.tar.bz2
    66f5a01a85530a91472a3acceb556db8  MesaLib-8.0.zip

## New features

- GL_ARB_ES2_compatibility (r300g, r600g)

- GL_ARB_depth_buffer_float (r600g)

- GL_ARB_vertex_type_2_10_10_10_rev (r600g)

- GL_ARB_texture_storage (gallium drivers and swrast)

- GL_EXT_packed_float (i965)

- GL_EXT_texture_array (r600g, i965)

- GL_EXT_texture_shared_exponent (i965)

- GL_NV_fog_distance (all gallium drivers, nouveau classic)

- GL_NV_primitive_restart (r600g)

- GL_OES_EGL_image_external (gallium drivers)

- GL_OES_compressed_ETC1_RGB8_texture (softpipe, llvmpipe)

- ARB_texture_rgb10_a2ui (softpipe, r600g)

- Many updates to the VMware svga Gallium driver

## Bug fixes

## Changes

- Removed all DRI drivers that did not support DRI2. Specifically, i810, mach64, mga, r128, savage, sis, tdfx, and unichrome were removed.

- Removed support for BeOS.

- Removed the obsolete (and unmaintained) Windows “gldirect” and “ICD” drivers.

- Removed the linux-fbdev software driver.

- Removed all remnants of paletted texture support. As required by desktop OpenGL, `GL_COLOR_INDEX` data can still be uploaded to a color (e.g., RGBA) texture. However, the data cannot be stored internally as color-index.

- Removed support for GL_APPLE_client_storage extension.

- Removed the classic Mesa r300 and r600 drivers, which are superseded by the gallium drivers for this hardware.

- Removed the dead Gallium i965, cell and failover drivers, which were either broken and with nobody in sight to fix the situation or deprecated.