Intel's Mesa Driver Is A Step Closer To ARB_gl_spirv Support

Igalia has sent out the fourth version of their patches for wiring in ARB_gl_spirv support into the Mesa OpenGL driver. This extension is the last main blocker from Intel having OpenGL 4.6 support and allows for SPIR-V ingestion support for better interoperability between OpenGL and Vulkan.

These latest 10 patches are quite similar to their previous revision but rebased to work against Mesa Git. ARB_gl_spirv allows for SPIR-V to be used by OpenGL programs/games in place (or complementing) OpenGL's GLSL shader language. This extension also allows GLSL to be used as a source language for creating SPIR-V modules. The extension is outlined in full via the Khronos.org.

The patches for now can be found on Mesa-dev.

AMD has also been working on their ARB_gl_spirv support and as part of that work with RadeonSI on supporting the NIR intermediate representation for code sharing/re-use with the RADV Vulkan driver.

Hopefully this ARB_gl_spirv code can be reviewed and land for Mesa 18.0 so this next release can theoretically advertise OpenGL 4.6 support, pending compliance with the Khronos OpenGL Test Suite.