Mesa's Gallium3D LLVMpipe Driver Adds Compute Shader Support

Red Hat's David Airlie has been refocusing efforts recently on improving the state of the LLVMpipe driver that implements OpenGL / OpenGL ES on top of CPUs using LLVM. In the past few weeks he's been wiring up more GL4 / GLES 3.1 extensions and this morning the latest achievement is supporting OpenGL compute shaders!

Following a long series of patches, Airlie has OpenGL compute shader support working for LLVMpipe in tandem with various LLVM/Gallivm changes.

In addition to getting compute shaders working for this "soft" OpenGL driver, he also implemented ARB_framebuffer_no_attachments support.

Compute shaders is a useful milestone for LLVMpipe with next quarter's Mesa 19.3 release to end out the year. Crossing off these extensions does put LLVMpipe quite close to reaching OpenGL ES 3.1 compliance... Just some ARB_vertex_attrib_binding bits are left to be completed for this driver. GLES 3.1 is now within reach for LLVMpipe but for hitting OpenGL 4.0 this driver remains blocked by ARB_gpu_shader5, ARB_sample_shading, and ARB_tessellation_shader support. Nevertheless it's exciting seeing the LLVMpipe activity in Mesa Git.