Red Hat Joins Khronos, The Group Behind OpenGL & Vulkan

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Red Hat Joins Khronos, The Group Behind OpenGL & Vulkan

It's become public today that Red Hat has joined The Khronos Group, the consortium responsible for the OpenGL, WebGL, and OpenCL standards, among many other industry standards, along with the new Vulkan and SPIR-V standards...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Red-Hat-Khronos-Group

[birdie]

Our efforts are likely to focus on improving the OpenGL specification by proposing some new extensions to OpenGL

I thought OpenGL development was complete and now Khronos is only developing Vulkan.

[uid313]

I thought OpenGL development was complete and now Khronos is only developing Vulkan.

I think OpenGL and Vulkan may be two different APIs for different purposes.

OpenGL is an abstract general-purpose graphics library, while Vulkan is more closer to the metal graphics API for better performance but requires more effort and code.

OpenGL is more high level and abstract.
Vulkan is more low level and close to metal.

Maybe we see a OpenGL 4.6 soon.

[peppercats]

I thought OpenGL development was complete and now Khronos is only developing Vulkan.

No, they're for different things. Vulkan is extremely low level. AFAIK when time permits there's a good chance that mesa's GL implementation will be redone ontop of Vulkan.

[mark45]

No, they're for different things. Vulkan is extremely low level. AFAIK when time permits there's a good chance that mesa's GL implementation will be redone ontop of Vulkan.

No, they're for the same thing - to do graphics and computing. GL is old, Vulkan is modern and not even completed and will eventually replace GL (which might take between 5 to 25 years). The fact that Vulkan is more low level than GL doesn't make it for a different purpose, it's just that this is how graphics devs want the new API to be.

[belal1]

My question is, why would Red Hat want some input on this matter at all? What does graphics ability have to do with Red Hat's fundamental competencies?

[stiiixy]

My question is, why would Red Hat want some input on this matter at all? What does graphics ability have to do with Red Hat's fundamental competencies?

I was thinking the same thing.

Pure speculation follows; maybe they have a vested interest in render servers, and making sure certain functions are available to their customers? By doing so, they protect and future-proof their existing customers and business, and produce some nice stuff that MIGHT be useful to the rest of us for free. Either way, it's their money to do with as they wish and so long as they aren't guiding the direction fo rtheir own purposes, go nuts!

[geearf]

My question is, why would Red Hat want some input on this matter at all? What does graphics ability have to do with Red Hat's fundamental competencies?

Don't they pay for Nouveau development?
If so simplifying drivers is in their best interest.

[RahulSundaram]

I was thinking the same thing.

Pure speculation follows; maybe they have a vested interest in render servers, and making sure certain functions are available to their customers? By doing so, they protect and future-proof their existing customers and business, and produce some nice stuff that MIGHT be useful to the rest of us for free. Either way, it's their money to do with as they wish and so long as they aren't guiding the direction fo rtheir own purposes, go nuts!

Although not acknowledged much, Red Hat has a lot of Xorg/Wayland driver development funded by them and plenty of commercial desktop/workstation type users using it for render farms and such. Of course, like any other commercial organization, they are indeed doing it for their own purposes but since it is all open source software, everyone benefits from the work.

[zxy_thf]

My question is, why would Red Hat want some input on this matter at all? What does graphics ability have to do with Red Hat's fundamental competencies?

It does matter because the whole Linux GUI will be rendered through OpenGL, directly (Gnome-shell,Clutter,Cairo-gl) or indirectly (Wayland+Xorg GLAMOR).