OpenGL ES 3.0 Support Soon Going Into Mesa

Intel is planning to soon begin merging the OpenGL ES 3.0 support patches into mainline Mesa.

Since the unveiling of the OpenGL ES 3.0 specification in early August, Intel Open-Source Technology Center developers have had a "GLES3" branch of Mesa where they have been working to enable this next version of OpenGL targeted towards mobile and embedded devices.

Intel shared plans early on that they want OpenGL ES 3.0 for Mesa by early 2013 with the next Mesa release -- what will be called Mesa 9.1 or Mesa 10.0, depending upon the GL version outcome. OpenGL ES 3.0 has a lot of new features over the aging OpenGL ES 2.0 specification, which makes it a really worthwhile upgrade. As part of this, Intel has been working on ETC2 texture compression and other functionality for this open-source Linux graphics driver.

Ian Romanick of Intel has now shared on the Mesa mailing list that in the coming days he will begin to post the GLES3 patches for review and then merge them into mainline Mesa.

The OpenGL ES 3.0 support isn't 100% complete, but it's damn close and the remaining bits are quickly coming together. "A lot of the work has been stable for some time, so I think it makes sense to start merging it. We're passing more and more conformance tests every day on the i965 driver. The remaining majority of the failures we're seeing a little things. It seems that all of the major components are in place."