Back in April [1]Mesa deprecated Gallium Nine alongside the XA state tracker used for X.Org Server acceleration. Gallium-XA was developed by VMware for use with their DDX driver for accelerating X11 within their virtualized environments. XA isn't really used these days and the generic GLAMOR code is in much better shape. Thus Mesa is now no longer building the XA code as the next step toward its removal.

Rather than just deprecating Gallium-XA but still building it by default, the Meson change was merged to Mesa yesterday to stop building the XA code by default. This change is also set to be back-ported to the Mesa 25.1 stable series. XA was interesting many years ago but no longer really the case, especially with most modern Linux desktop users now on Wayland. It was one of many interesting Mesa innovations out of VMware back in the day following their [2]acquisition of Tungsten Graphics and being a big Mesa contributor long before Valve and other current stakeholders.

[3]This commit is what goes ahead and stops building the old XA code by default for Mesa. If all goes well the XA code could be removed from the Mesa codebase for next quarter's Mesa 25.2 release.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Gallium-Nine-Deprecated

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/news/NjkyNw

[3] https://cgit.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/commit/?id=31cf6b94ad1dfaf4272b22a39d7e2805d03f9375