External Objects For Mesa's RadeonSI Should Land This Week

The Valve-led work on implementing EXT_external_objects support inside Mesa should soon be landing. This is good news as it's one of the last remaining bits for seeing mainline RadeonSI/RADV working out well for SteamVR on Linux.

Andres Rodriguez of Valve had been working on the OpenGL External Objects for Mesa, which is basically about bringing Vulkan's external memory capabilities over to the OpenGL space. The OpenGL external memory object support is used by the SteamVR compositor on Linux. Presumably this EXT_external_objects support will be part of the likely OpenGL 4.6 update we could be seeing soon.

With Andres being away at the moment, Timothy Arceri -- another Mesa developer working for Valve -- has taken to re-basing the 24 patches for EXT_external_objects and EXT_external_objects_fd and addressing comments raised during review. Hitting the mailing list just minutes ago was the v4 patches. Arceri believes this will be the last version of these patches and is planning to mainline them by the end of the week.

While there is some common Mesa code as part of this work and to the Gallium3D Mesa state tracker, the extensions are only wired up for RadeonSI. There are also changes to RADV for ensuring both RadeonSI/RADV produce the same UUIDs.