Mesa Slowly Picking Up OpenGL 3 Support

Intel's Ian Romanick has announced on the Mesa3D development list that he has made available an arb_sync branch of Mesa. As implied by its name, this branch implements support for the GL_ARB_sync extension, which just officially debuted with OpenGL 3.2. Initially this GL_ARB_sync support in Mesa is just implemented within the software rasterizer, but it's expected within days that it will receive hardware-accelerated support within Intel's Mesa3D driver. The GL_ARB_sync extension brings the concept of "sync objects", which is described at length within its specification.

This is not the first OpenGL 3 extension to be added to Mesa, but this month support for GL_ARB_copy_buffer, GL_ARB_seamless_cube_map, and others have made their way into Mesa too. However, the only hardware driver receiving this support right now has been for Intel.

Ian Romanick explained that over the coming months they hope to add "a bunch of new functionality", but a lot of work is certainly ahead. Intel is also still deciding whether or not they will be switching to a Gallium3D driver once that new infrastructure has matured, because of the work involved with having to rewrite their driver, which is why this code is currently going into the classic Mesa stack.