Latest Intel ARB_gl_spirv Patches Published By Igalia

It's almost one year since the release of OpenGL 4.6 and while there is support outside of the Mesa tree, mainline Mesa still doesn't support this latest OpenGL revision due to the holdups around SPIR-V ingestion support.

Intel's i965 and AMD's RadeonSI drivers would have supported OpenGL 4.6 with mainline Mesa months ago, but they've been held up on the ARB_gl_spirv extension and the related ARB_spirv_extensions support. This work allows for SPIR-V modules to be used by OpenGL complementary to GLSL and allows for GLSL to also to be used as a source language for creating SPIR-V modules for OpenGL consumption. This is basically all about better interoperability between OpenGL and Vulkan -- not an easy task to implement.

Patches have been flowing for months and in the RadeonSI case has also meant working on the NIR back-end for code re-use with the existing Mesa Vulkan code. On the Intel front, Igalia developers have posted their latest patch series.

The latest 21 patches came out today and are for supporting uniforms and other extra bits. It appears the ARB_gl_spirv work for i965 is getting closer to mainline, but still not quite there yet. At this stage it looks like RadeonSI may still need some extra time, especially given their NIR upbringing work.

This OpenGL 4.6 support didn't make it for Mesa 18.1 and thus the next opportunity is to have the support squared away for Mesa 18.2, which will be released as stable in July or August, or one year after the GL 4.6 debut.