Intel Starts On Mesa Compute Shaders Support

Paul Berry at Intel has published his mega set of 30 patches for Mesa that are very exciting as they work to start implementing compute shaders support inside Mesa.

The 30 patches begin implementing ARB_compute_shader support inside the open-source OpenGL stack. The ARB_compute_shader extension allows arbitrary workloads to be done on the GPU. Compute shaders in OpenGL are somewhat similar to OpenCL but there's many low-level differences, among them is that compute shaders are still written in GLSL. For those not familiar with OpenGL compute shaders, see the Khronos.org registry.

The Mesa patches right now allow the front-end parsing of compute shaders and to compile a "do-nothing" shader. The compute shader support isn't yet complete and with that right now it's just being focused on for the Intel Mesa driver. The Intel driver support is hidden behind an environment variable until stabilized and complete.

The Intel Mesa compute shader support patches can be found on the Mesa-dev list.