Mesa 25.3.6 released – what you need to know
Mesa 25.3.6 is now available as the last update of the 25.3 branch. The build packs a handful of bug‑fixes that were holding back older hardware and a couple of obscure crashes that showed up after a recent driver refresh. If staying on the 25.3 line, it’s worth grabbing; otherwise plan to jump to the 26.0 series soon.
Why the update matters
The most noticeable change is a fix for the WSI/Metal color‑space handling when the instance extension is enabled. Another practical improvement drops a buggy SLM optimization in the Broadwell driver that was causing intermittent freezes on older Intel chips. Users who have seen their games stutter after a Windows update will probably recognize the pattern; the underlying issue was a mis‑compiled cooperative matrix constant source, now corrected.
Key fixes you’ll see
The release also cleans up a handful of internal compiler quirks: the pan/bi passes now run lower_alu_width after algebraic optimizations, preventing incorrect register pressure on AMD GPUs. Vulkan’s command queue stride handling for multi‑draw calls has been fixed, which should stop occasional validation layer warnings that appeared when using large indirect draws. On the OpenGL side, the Intel driver no longer dumps BVH data before a command buffer is submitted – a change that reduces unnecessary GPU stalls.
A subtle but helpful adjustment stops the Mesa core from unbinding a generic point when different indexed points are deleted. This prevents a rare “invalid state” error that popped up in some scientific visualization tools after an upgrade to glibc 2.38. The fix for const‑correctness across several compilers also means fewer compiler warnings when building custom shaders with the latest clang.
How to upgrade safely
First, back up any custom Mesa configuration files you might have edited – they usually live under /etc/X11/mesa or in your home directory’s .config/mesa. Then download the tarball from the official archive and verify the SHA256 checksum; the value is 59217efeac3b64e7ced958324b9db7494f1e0741aeb22d780276514cc1b8f206. Extract the archive, run meson setup builddir --prefix=/usr/local, and then ninja -C builddir install. The extra step of running ldconfig afterward ensures the new libraries are picked up before any stale ones linger in memory.
If you’re using a distribution that provides Mesa 25.3.6 as a package, simply run the normal update command (sudo apt upgrade mesa* on Debian‑based systems or sudo dnf update mesa* on Fedora). After the install, restart X or reboot to let the new driver load cleanly. Users who keep multiple Mesa versions side by side should make sure their environment variables point at the fresh binaries – otherwise you might still be running the older 25.3.5 without realizing it.
What’s next
Dylan Baker has signaled that the 26.0 series will become the primary development branch, so expect more frequent feature drops and broader hardware support there. For most users on relatively recent GPUs, moving to 26.0 sooner rather than later will bring better Vulkan performance and newer OpenGL extensions. However, if you’re stuck on legacy silicon or a custom Linux build that only validates against the 25.x series, sticking with 25.3.6 until your distro catches up is perfectly fine.
