Collabora Still Investing In "Zink" For OpenGL Over Vulkan, But Back To GL 2.1

Zink is the year-old project implementing OpenGL over Vulkan using Mesa/Gallium3D infrastructure. While Zink had been making some good progress by developer Erik Faye-Lund of Collabora, he went back to rewriting some core pieces of Zink to address some design defects. In the process of this rewrite, Zink is currently back to OpenGL 2.1 era support over Vulkan.

Zink is now implementing proper control-flow, two-sided lighting is supported, shadow samplers are now supported, occlusion queries are now correctly working, and a number of other issues addressed. But in doing so, Erik rewrote core parts of Zink that changed its overall design. But that dropped it back to OpenGL 2.1 compliance. Erik notes that while eventually they will be back up to OpenGL 3.0+, cleaning up the code and getting it upstreamed in Mesa will likely be higher priority.

Those interested in learning more about the current state of Zink (it's at least enough to run Blender), see the Collabora blog for more details.