Raspberry Pi 4's V3D Driver Lands OpenGL ES 3.1 Bits In Mesa 19.3-devel

The Broadcom "V3D" Gallium3D driver that is most notably used by the new Raspberry Pi 4 boards now is effectively at OpenGL ES 3.1 support within the newest Mesa 19.3 code.

We've known that Igalia has been ironing out OpenGL ES 3.1 for V3D after taking over the work from Eric Anholt who left Broadcom earlier this year to go work for Google.

Merged this past week was the OpenGL compute shader bits as the main blocker that prevented the V3D open-source Gallium3D driver from exposing GLES 3.1. Following that was a memory violation fix and then explicitly exposing OpenGL ES Shading Language 3.1. That merge request does note that a few more fixes are still needed before V3D will officially pass all of the OpenGL ES 3.1 conformance tests, but at least Mesa 19.3's code is good enough along to enable the support.

Mesa 19.3 should be releasing around early December with these V3D improvements and much more to end out the year. The V3D driver stack is in great shape overall these days while unfortunately there hasn't been much activity on Vulkan support, but hopefully that will change for 2020 with the important GLES 3.1 milestone being crossed.