Marek Begins Working On Possible OpenGL Compatibility Profile For Mesa

[MagicMyth]

I thought the devs had decided upon not ever supporting the compatibility profiles, to keep the driver leaner and more stable.

Well there is getting less and less work for them to do on OpenGL so maybe Marek just got bored?

[oooverclocker]

Yeah. But there are already whitelists etc. As long as Vulkan is kept as a fixed standard that won't do any compromise for broken software I am personally not that strongly against messing around more in OpenGL anymore. I mean the performance got better and the game devs are already depraved for OpenGL.
But Vulkan needs a lightweight driver so it wouldn't be a good idea to do the same mess with it. It better breaks some graphics of a stupid dev's game in order to stay clean and precise according to specification.

AMD will still need to keep the blob alive for other OS options, so nothing will really change.

Doesn't make sense in my opinion. But I also don't really understand what you mean by "OS options". Of course those who are working on the Windows drivers won't switch to the open source drivers - when this was what you meant.
But those who are currently working on the closed source Linux drivers surely won't really have something better to do than improving MESA from the OpenGL side as well as from the Vulkan or OpenCL side.

So in my opinion it's up to AMD what's achievable and what is affordable. You can save money which might still be an important point for AMD. But you can also take the chance that seems to be bigger than I thought before to take the lead in a promising market. When I look at the Atari Box there might be more consoles of this kind in the future when the ecosystem is established. AMD could provide the whole Package of CPU, GPU, Memory on one single PCB. You can't ship and produce all that you need cheaper than that.
And the positive thing from the view of AMD is that Nvidia did everything they could to decrease their reputation in the Linux community and they pretty surely won't publish their code of their dedicated GPUs.
As Ryzen is running well and Vega seems to be also running well for mining and Linux it's no bad Idea I guess to keep up the investments for Linux professional and gaming sectors.

[jrch2k8]

Well, I just hope all marek is doing is uping the current compatibility from 3.0 to 3.1 because is small and clean but I really would hate full compatibility profiles polluting the driver at this stage, if Marek is bored there is always clover

About the BLOB I agree with Hibbel, simply put businesses won't easily accept an Open Source driver unless AMD can find a license round about to provide legal guarantees and a certification process. Note you can present every technical PoV you want and I will agree with you on why FOSS > BLOB but remember this details are useless to suits and specially legal departments full of suits.

So, regardless the BLOB will live for certain SUIT markets on RADEON PRO cards and AMDGPU for everyone else

[VikingGe]

Given that Mesa already supports the mess that is OpenGL 3.0 with a whole bunch of extensions, what would actually have to change (other than context creation / exposing more entry points) in order to support GL 3.2+ compatibility profile contexts?

If they are actually going to implement it, I hope they make sure that it doesn't negatively affect the core profile implementation.

[nomadewolf]

I would guess not that much. Maybe there are 1 or 2 people making the os agnostic blob compatible with Linux, but not that much more. AMD will still need to keep the blob alive for other OS options, so nothing will really change.

If the Linux OSS driver becomes better than the proprietary one, shouldn't we expect an OSS driver to 'arise' for Windows as well?

[bwyan]

I play Dying Light using radeonsi, it just needs an override

Even when using said override, it is still unable to launch properly on Tumbleweed.

[Dukenukemx]

Which mesa version and which override?
They changed something recently (DL, I think, there were at least two updates recently), now it just shows nothing instead of crashing. :-D

In Steam go to Launch Options for Dying Light and enter "MESA_GL_VERSION_OVERRIDE=4.5 MESA_GLSL_VERSION_OVERRIDE=450 %command%" without quotes. I've even gotten this to work on my Radeon HD 6850 by using 4.1 instead of 4.5. But yes, the compatibility profile for these drivers are a huge problem that needs to be fixed.

[frosth]

Emdek let's try this in "launch option":

MESA_GLSL_VERSION_OVERRIDE=450 MESA_GL_VERSION_OVERRIDE=4.5 %command%

but like bwyan said it works not for all distros.
I can play this game on mesa17.2.x/llvm5 in ubuntu 17.04 but sadly not in archlinux or ubuntu 17.10(rc/beta)2 or latest fedora (pre beta)

[Emdek]

@frosth, thanks, but I think that I've tried these overrides in the past, warning was gone but crash remained.
Maybe I'll try it again later, since apparently something changed recently, crash was replaced by black screen.

[duby229]

As far as I'm concerned it's about time. Good looking out Marek.