"Kopper" Merged Into Mesa As A Big Win For Zink

[phoronix]

Phoronix: "Kopper" Merged Into Mesa As A Big Win For Zink

Merged into Mesa 22.1-devel this morning is Kopper, a big improvement particularly for the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver code...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Mesa-Kopper-Merged

[mangeek]

This is fantastic, and it unlocks the option for driver developers to make Vulkan-only drivers, with Zink handling the OpenGL ES used by desktop environments. I can't wait to test GNOME-on-Zink out to see if it's viable.

[ermo]

A part of me is idly wondering if (portions of) this can be ported to Haiku OS, which will likely only ever support 3D acceleration via FLOSS Vulkan drivers -- presumably because it's too resource intensive for Haiku to implement native OpenGL drivers for the supported GPUs...

[novhack]

I remember when Vulkan was released and the official statement was that it's not a replacement for OpenGL. Well yes, but actually no.

[RahulSundaram]

I remember when Vulkan was released and the official statement was that it's not a replacement for OpenGL. Well yes, but actually no.

What they meant by that is that Vulkan is more low level than OpenGL, so it is not a direct replacement. It does not mean that you can't substitute OpenGL usage with Vulkan usage if you want more low level control or map OpenGL to Vulcan underneath.

[R41N3R]

This is great and definitly something I look forward to test in the next Mesa release! Wonder if Plasma Wayland will work on Zink then :-)

[kokoko3k]

What is the point of running existing drivers on Zink instead of the "native" opengl implementation by intel/nvidia/amd?

[novhack]

What they meant by that is that Vulkan is more low level than OpenGL, so it is not a direct replacement. It does not mean that you can't substitute OpenGL usage with Vulkan usage if you want more low level control or map OpenGL to Vulcan underneath.

I know. It was a joke.

[RahulSundaram]

I know. It was a joke.

Ah, my bad. Hard to decipher humor with just text sometimes.

[cl333r]

What they meant by that is that Vulkan is more low level than OpenGL, so it is not a direct replacement. It does not mean that you can't substitute OpenGL usage with Vulkan usage if you want more low level control or map OpenGL to Vulcan underneath.

What lower level control are you talking about? - if you want low level control you'd use Vulkan, OpenGL is not a low level API.