OpenGL ES 3.0 Support In Mesa Is Getting Close

Mainline support in the Mesa library for the OpenGL ES 3.0 specification is getting close to becoming a reality.

OpenGL ES 3.0 was released in August alongside the OpenGL 4.3 update as the latest major industry-standard graphics API for embedded and mobile devices. Intel was quick to announce they wanted OpenGL ES 3.0 support in Mesa and were hoping to have official support for the spec in early 2013. This OpenGL ES update offers a lot of new features.

Intel finally reached OpenGL ES 2.0 certification with the Intel Mesa driver in late summer, but since the beginning they've been doing early GLES 3.0 prototyping work in a separate Mesa repository.

ETC2 texture compression support was merged into mainline Mesa earlier this month as one of the prerequisites for hitting on OpenGL ES 3.0. This came after Ian Romanick shared in mid-November he would soon be posting patches for review and merging.

It's taken over a month, but more of these patches for official review are finally hitting the Mesa mailing list. Among the OpenGL ES 3.0 related activity for Intel on the mailing list this week was reviewing GL_ARB_internalformat_query and GL_ARB_get_program_binary.

The work Intel is doing to bring up OpenGL ES 3.0 support in their open-source driver is revolving around core Mesa and their i965 DRI driver. Additional work will be needed by other open-source developers for enabling the new OpenGL ES support within the various Gallium3D hardware drivers.