S3TC Support Lands In Mesa Git Along With An OpenGL 4.6 Extension For Intel

Rejoice as S3TC (S3 Texture Compression) support now resides within Mesa Git following its patent expiry on Monday.

Monday marked the S3TC patent expiring and that led an Intel developer to right away send out patches for S3TC in Mesa, basically importing the libtxc_dxtn code into core Mesa, which was legally murky up until S3 Graphics' patent expired.

Overnight that couple hundred lines of code landed in Mesa Git, it's unconditionally enabled, and the previous "force_s3tc_enabled" tunables and related code is now dropped with the code always being present. Hooray! The code is set for Mesa 17.3 and isn't marked as candidates for backporting to 17.2.

Also hitting Mesa 17.3 Git overnight but unrelated to the S3TC is also ARB_indirect_parameters supports within i965. ARB_indirect_parameters is supported with Intel Gen 7+ graphics and newer. RadeonSI and NVC0 already support this extension mandated by OpenGL 4.6 while now the Intel support is wired up.