Intel's Mesa Driver Is OpenGL 4.6 Compliant, But Won't Be Mainline For A While

As noted when covering the news yesterday of Khronos launching the OpenGL 4.6 Adopters Program, the NVIDIA proprietary driver and Intel's open-source Linux driver are the first OpenGL drivers considered 4.6 compliant. But on the Intel Linux side, the OpenGL 4.6 work has yet to be all upstreamed into Mesa.

Igalia has put out a blog post today covering the new OpenGL Conformance Test Suite (CTS) and their work along with Intel developers in getting Intel's i965 Mesa driver across the OpenGL 4.6 milestone. But why I'm less than excited at the moment is the work isn't yet living within Mesa, meaning it will still be quite some time before users see this OpenGL 4.6 support with the latest Intel hardware. It's already too late for getting this work into the upcoming Ubuntu 18.04 LTS release.

Igalia's Iago Toral acknowledges in today's blog post, "the [OpenGL SPIR-V] feature is not completely upstreamed yet. We are working hard on this, but the scope of the implementation that we want for upstream is rather ambitious, since it involves to (finally) have a full shader linker in NIR. Getting that to be as complete as the current GLSL linker and in a shape that is good enough for review and upstreaming is going to take some time, but it is surely a worthwhile effort that will pay off in the future, so please look forward to it and be patient with us as we upstream more of it in the coming months."

Hearing that it could still be months before seeing the Intel OpenGL 4.6 / SPIR-V support is unfortunate but the reality due to the complexity of this addition, but as the work is closer to mainline along with any other Mesa advancements, as always you will be able to read about it on Phoronix.

The RadeonSI crew also remains working on their SPIR-V support and as part of that the NIR back-end. Aside from the ARB_gl_spirv and ARB_spirv_extensions, both RadeonSI and i965 meet the other changes needed by OpenGL 4.6.