Revised Patches For One Of The Last GL 4.4 Items For Intel's Mesa Driver

Timothy Arceri of Collabora published his second version of patches on Friday for implementing ARB_enhanced_layouts packing support for Mesa's Intel i965 driver.

Finishing up ARB_enhanced_layouts is basically the latest extension needed before the Intel driver will be able to declare OpenGL 4.4 compliance. Similar to a lot of other GL4 work in the Intel driver, this ARB_enhanced_layouts packing support is currently limited to Broadwell (Gen8) graphics hardware and newer.

The V2 of this work amounts to 18 patches and is currently sitting on the Mesa-dev list.

It's great to see the Intel driver getting incredibly close to OpenGL 4.4 as is also the case for Nouveau NVC0 while the RadeonSI driver still has a few more extensions to catch up on. For OpenGL 4.5 compliance by the Intel open-source driver, the main extension left is exposing ARB_ES_3_1_compatibility, which should more or less be done considering the Intel Mesa driver already has OpenGL ES 3.1 support. When it comes to OpenGL ES 3.2 though, there's still a fair amount of work outstanding.

Overall it's still looking like the Mesa 12.0+1 stable release that will come around September should have OpenGL 4.5 for at least the Intel driver on Broadwell and newer but hopefully NVC0 and RadeonSI will be there too.