Igalia Sends Out Another 26 Patches Chipping Away On Intel ARB_gl_spirv Support

OpenGL 4.6 has been out for more than a year but the Mesa-based drivers (namely RadeonSI and Intel) remain blocked from officially advertising this latest GL revision due to not yet supporting the ARB_gl_spirv extension and related ARB_spirv_extensions.

Intel Open-Source Technology Center developers and consulting firm Igalia have been working on this key component to OpenGL 4.6 for allowing SPIR-V ingestion (the now common IR to OpenGL / Vulkan / OpenCL) but it's a tall order and even with many patch series still isn't quite to the finish line yet.

On Saturday, another 26 patches were sent out by Igalia's Alejandro Piñeiro. This time around the patches are for getting UBOs (Uniform Buffer Objects) and SSBOs (Shader Storage Buffer Objects) working with ARB_gl_spirv. Getting these bits supported along the code path is another 1300 lines of code.

Intel is inching closer to having ARB_gl_spirv all spun up and we have our fingers crossed that milestone could still be reached in time for Mesa 18.3 to end out 2018. Hopefully we'll hear more about the Intel/Igalia plans for finishing it up later this month at XDC 2018.