Igalia Aligns Latest Patches For Giving Intel's Mesa Driver OpenGL 4.6

Igalia developers have been very involved with the Intel open-source developers on getting the long-awaited OpenGL 4.6 support into the "i965" Mesa driver. As has been the case for a while, out-of-tree patches can allow this to happen but with the Mesa 18.2 branching soon, it doesn't look like this will materialize ahead of this next release.

Igalia developers have arranged the opengl-cts-4.6.0.20180713 Mesa branch as part of their tree. This recently updated code is 249 patches ahead of master at this point, quite a tall order for it to land ahead of the Mesa 18.2 branching expected later this week (20 July).

Phoronix reader FireBurn has shared that he tested out these patches re-based to Mesa master. Indeed, it's enough to get OpenGL 4.6 exposed with his Intel HD Graphics 530 Skylake hardware.

OpenGL 4.6 support when landed will be available for Intel "Gen 8" Broadwell graphics hardware and newer. With OpenGL 4.6 now marking its one year anniversary, hopefully it won't be too much longer before this code merges to mainline Mesa. The RadeonSI OpenGL 4.6 support also isn't expected to be too far behind. See our original OpenGL 4.6 launch article if you've since forgot about the various updates/additions to this GL spec update: the most notable of which -- and taking the longest time for the work to settle in Mesa -- has been pertaining to the introduction of the SPIR-V extensions.