Intel's Mesa Driver Is Very Close To Having FP64, Thereby OpenGL 4 Support

[microcode]

This branch only has "Enable ARB_gpu_shader_fp64 for gen8+". In the bug entry there is an old statement

So I guess it's still coming later?

I suspect that makes a lot of sense for them. They've been putting this one off because it's daunting and famously unused. Supporting gen7 would likely make it even more daunting; and less likely to be completed in a timely fashion or at all.

My intuition, as a software developer who works in teams about the size of intel's, that gen7 will come faster if they let themselves deliver gen8+ ahead of others.

[Ancurio]

except because there IS a number change games and other programs will work by default and you won't have to tell your system to spoof a different level of GL. That's critical for game devs and very helpful for users

Nah, you're making it sound as if game devs cared about their games running under Mesa. If they did, all they'd have to do is fix their own code to only query extensions they actually use instead of a whole GL version. That's just a couple of lines of code, vs. the hundreds or even thousands that are required for complex extensions such as fp64.