Did Hell Freeze Over? Intel Mesa Does GLSL 1.30!

Here's quite an unexpected surprise: GL Shading Language 1.30 support in Mesa for Intel Sandy Bridge hardware (Gen6 and newer) is now marked as complete. GLSL 1.30 has been the big item to tackle in obtaining OpenGL 3.0 compliance for this critical open-source graphics component.

Eric Anholt of Intel committed on Friday the final piece of the GLSL 1.30 puzle for the Intel Mesa DRI driver: changing the reported GLSL version from 1.20 to 1.30, which is the requirement of the shading language for GL3. This is for Intel Sandy Bridge graphics and newer.

As Eric says in the commit message, "everything required should now be supported."

Rounding off the GLSL 1.30 compatibility is a big milestone towards passing OpenGL 3.0 support. OpenGL 3.0 is nearly done in Mesa and Intel hopes to have it complete by year's end. There's still some work left, but it's good to see GLSL 1.30 now crossed off the TODO list.

The change on Friday was for GLSL 1.30 exposure within the Intel DRI driver, but the Gallium3D drivers such as for Radeon and Nouveau shouldn't be too far behind.

To see the work items left for OpenGL 3.0 in Mesa, there's the detailed work queue page setup by Intel.

This is great news and comes also at a time when there might be great news for S3TC support too.

Rounding off the OpenGL 3.0 support by the end of the calendar year, or roughly around that point, will result in Mesa 7.12 being shipped as Mesa 8.0. Mesa 7.12/8.0 is already shaping up to be a hell of a release with many major improvements to the drivers, core Mesa, the Gallium3D state trackers, etc.

Kudos to all of the developers involved with the GL3 upbringing in Mesa. It's taken nearly three years, but OpenGL 3.0 is just about there. After that it's onto playing catch-up with OpenGL 3.1/3.2/3.3, which isn't too bad, but OpenGL 4.0/4.1/4.2 is expected to cause many more headaches.