Intel Geometry Shaders Code Merged Into Mesa

Intel's Paul Berry merged a large stack of OpenGL Geometry Shader patches for the Intel DRI driver into mainline Mesa.

One week ago it looked like the Intel Geometry Shader code might be ready for their open-source Linux driver, which is one of the last remaining items to be marked off the list until the driver can officially claim itself supportive of the OpenGL 3.2 specification. For those unfamiliar with geometry shaders in the context of OpenGL, see the OpenGL Wiki for extensive information on this GL3 feature.

Paul Berry pushed a number of Mesa commits on Saturday and among them were to implement support for geometry shader samplers, support for geometry shader surfaces, and other changes.

With geometry shaders support getting settled, there's really only some other GL Shading Language (GLSL) changes that need to be made for reaching OpenGL 3.3 compliance in Mesa -- at least in regards to the Intel hardware driver. But after that, there's lots to be done for OpenGL 4.x support. Intel expects OpenGL 3.3 support in Mesa before the end of the calendar year.

With this new GL support, the next Mesa release will likely be called Mesa 10.0 rather than Mesa 9.3. Fortunately, it looks like Mesa will also move to a faster release schedule rather than having to wait six months to ship changes, so this new OpenGL support should get to Linux (non-Git) users in a much quicker manner.