Gallium3D's LLVMpipe Could Use Some Help

While the LLVMpipe driver is commonly used these days as a software fall-back driver on numerous Linux distributions in cases where no hardware GPU driver is available or working, the LLVMpipe state leaves a lot to be desired. In addition to it benefiting from any speed improvements, there's also lots of help it could use on implementing newer OpenGL support.

OpenGL 4.x support is slowly getting into the picture for the Mesa hardware drivers like Radeon, Intel, and Nouveau, but this reference LLVMpipe driver isn't seeing much OGL4 attention. LLVMpipe is important not only for software fallback situations but it's also of use for driver/game developers in testing their code against a hardware-neutral code-path in trying to work out bugs/regressions.

Roland Scheidegger of VMware shared some of the priority items needing attention within LLVMpipe. Among those on his impromptu list was proper multi-sampling support, rewrite attribute interpolation, real control flow handling, and AVX2 support. From VMware's perspective, they're not even really concerned about OpenGL 4.x features but do invite independent contributors to Mesa to work on the support.