KHR_variable_pointers & KHR_storage_buffer_storage_class Land In Mesa ANV Git

Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver developers have continued landing support for the new extensions introduced by Vulkan 1.0.54.

A few days back the Intel developers began landing Vulkan 1.0.54 changes in the "ANV" driver and today is support for two more extensions: VK_KHR_variable_pointers and VK_KHR_storage_buffer_storage_class. The variable pointers extension is for indicating support for SPIR-V variable pointers. One of the immediate users of this variable pointers is by clspv for converting OpenCL code to Vulkan SPIR-V for compute. The VK_KHR_storage_buffer_storage class extension implies support for SPIR-V's SPV_KHR_storage_buffer_storage_class. This is an addition of a new StorageBuffer Storage Class for SPIR- and deprecates BufferBlock.

With the latest Mesa Git code today, these two extensions are now exposed by Intel ANV along with the associated NIR/SPIR-V changes. Great to see these additional Vulkan extensions land in time for the Mesa 17.2 branching that is expected to happen by the end of the week while Mesa 17.2.0 will be officially released in a few weeks.