Intel Takes Another Stab At OpenGL 4 In Mesa

Written by Michael Larabel in Mesa on 9 June 2014 at 10:01 AM EDT. 7 Comments
MESA
Another OpenGL 4 extension has landed in Mesa by Intel's Open-Source Technology Center crew for the Mesa 10.3 release at the end of the summer.

The latest GL4 extension marked off in Mesa is a large patch-set that resulted in the ARB_compressed_texture_pixel_storage extension. The ARB_compressed_texture_pixel_storage support is part of the OpenGL 4.2 specification and documented via the OpenGL.org registry, "This extension expands the functionality of the PixelStore modes to allow UNPACK_ROW_LENGTH, UNPACK_SKIP_ROWS, UNPACK_SKIP_PIXELS, UNPACK_IMAGE_HEIGHT and UNPACK_SKIP_IMAGES to affect the operation of CompressedTexImage*D and CompressedTexSubImage*D...This extension is designed primarily to support compressed image formats with fixed-size blocks."

With this extension completed, most of the OpenGL 4.2 extensions are implemented sans all the necessary changes needed to the GL Shading Language support, per the documentation. The only other main GL 4.2 extensions outside of the GLSL work is GL_ARB_texture_compression_bptc and GL_ARB_shader_image_load_store. But before hitting OpenGL 4.2, GL 4.0 and 4.1 must first be wrapped up...

The big blocker of OpenGL 4.0 right now for core Mesa (and at least Intel's DRI driver) is the GLSL 4.00 changes, completing GL_ARB_gpu_shader5, adding the important GL_ARB_tessellation_shader, and taking care of some other extensions like GL_ARB_shader_subroutine and GL_ARB_gpu_shader_fp64. Hopefully we'll still see OpenGL 4.0 support in Mesa in 2014... For OpenGL 4.1, there's GLSL 4.1 changes to do plus GL_ARB_shader_precision and GL_ARB_vertex_attrib_64bit.
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