OpenGL 4.3's Arrays-of-Arrays Getting Back On Track For Mesa

Back in 2013 Timothy Arceri sought crowd-funding to work on another OpenGL extension for Mesa: GL_ARB_arrays_of_arrays. While progress was made on this OpenGL 4.3 extension, the "AoA" support has yet to be merged to mainline but progress is being made.

Arceri published a set of 19 patches today for enabling ARB_arrays_of_arrays support for OpenGL ES 3.1. He explained, "The restrictions in ES make the extension easier to implement so I thought I'd try get this stuff reviewed an committed before finishing up the full extension. The bits that I'm still working on for the desktop version are AoA inputs outputs, and interface blocks. The only thing I know is definatly missing in this series for ES is support for indirect indexing of samplers, but that didn't seem like something that should hold up the series."

He also explained in the patch series, "Once the SSBO series lands (with a patch that restricts unsized arrays) then all the AoA ES conformance tests will pass...I haven't made a patch marking this as done yet because currently the i965 backend takes a very long time trying to optimise some of the conformance tests. They still pass but they are taking 15-minutes+ just to compile so this really needs to be sorted out first. If someone with more knowledge in this area than me wants to take a look at this I would be greatful for being pointed in the right direction."

The GL_ARB_arrays_of_arrays extension is basically as it sounds for allowing GLSL arrays of arrays to happen. Hopefully the AoA support for at least OpenGL ES will be ready for Mesa 10.7/11.0 this September.