Prolific Open-Source Contributor Implements Another GL 4.5 Extension In Mesa

Ilia Mirkin, the independent developer known for his contributions to the open-source Nouveau and Freedreno graphics drivers, has implemented another OpenGL 4.5 extension in core Mesa and exposed it for the Intel i965 graphics driver.

Mirkin has enabled support for the ARB_shader_texture_image_samples extension in core Mesa and the i965 driver today, via a series of commits.

As explained by the official extension specification, "this extension provides GLSL built-in functions allowing shaders to query the number of samples of a texture."

Ignoring all of the rest of the OpenGL 4.x extensions needed, core Mesa for OpenGL 4.5 has implemented a number of the needed extensions but still misses out right now on ARB_ES3_1_compatibility, ARB_cull_distance, KHR_robust_buffer_access_behavior, and still needs to finish KHR_robustness. It likely won't be until sometime in 2016 that Mesa reaches OpenGL 4.5 compliance, but at least progress continues being made from a wide variety of contributors.