Phoronix: Intel Merges Mesa Hardware Context Support
Kenneth Graunke committed the i965 Mesa driver hardware context support patch on Tuesday. Meanwhile, the Radeon Gallium3D driver has also seen improvements...
Actually, transform feedback is already supported on both Sandybridge and Ivybridge. However, we'll need this in place to support geometry shaders (3.2) together with transform feedback. It'll be useful for TF + primitive restart as well. Right now, we count some things manually in software, rather than relying on the hardware counters; this lets us use the hardware as intended.
Also, I feel compelled to mention that Ben Widawsky deserves all the credit here - I just made the couple line Mesa patch to use it in a fairly preliminary fashion. (Plus it was wrong, and Ben had to fix it.) I'm definitely grateful to Ben for doing this.