Work Towards OpenGL 3.0 In Mesa, Glamor, PM

While the Intel Mesa DRI Linux graphics driver hit the milestone last week of hitting GLSL 1.30 compliance (for Sandy Bridge hardware) as needed per the OpenGL 3.0 specification, there's still a fair amount of other work to take care of before reaching full GL3 support. There's also some news to report with regard to UXA Glamor acceleration and Intel DRM power management.

Intel hopes to have OpenGL 3.0 support advertised by their open-source Linux driver by the end of the year and in order to accomplish that they need to clear out their work queue that's displayed on the DRI FreeDesktop.org Wiki. Among the work left is tesselate primitives, partial primitives, rasterizer discard, generating GLSL IR for ARB assembly programs and NV vertex assembly programs, vertex shader texturing support, GLX protocol additions, and various other items. However, the list of high and medium priority requirements for GL3.0 is beginning to thin out and it looks like they may be close to reaching this important level of OpenGL support before year's end. Intel OSTC developers obviously care about getting their driver working with GL3, while the Radeon and Nouveau Gallium3D drivers will hopefully not be too far behind.

Mesa 7.12 is set to be released in January, but if OpenGL 3.0 support is there it will be re-labelled as Mesa 8.0. If the OpenGL 3.0 support is almost there but not quite, Ian Romanick has said he would consider delaying the Mesa 7.12/8.0 release until it's ready. (See the many OpenGL 3.0 news items for more information.)

The latest OpenGL 3.0 work that's been published by Intel comes in form of the texture format rework patch series from Eric Anholt. In the end, the set of 15 patches add support for half-float formats and other texture formats needed by the OpenGL 3.0 specification.

In related Intel Linux news, Zhigang Gong out of Intel China continues working on the Intel driver patches for the Glamor acceleration architecture that uses OpenGL for accelerating X.Org 2D drawing. (In a similar manner to Gallium3D's Xorg state tracker for accelerating EXA with the GPU's 3D engine.) In the past few hours he published a new set of Intel UXA Glamor patches.

Matthew Garrett, just days after publishing the ASPM regression solution, has put out today some Intel DRM patches that reduce the number of wake-ups caused by the Intel DRM driver due to vblank handling, which in turn can save power. That is the reduce idle vblank patch series. This would be a candidate for the Linux 3.3 kernel.