GLOVE: OpenGL ES Over Vulkan As Open-Source

Think Silicon announced this morning they have open-sourced GLOVE, a middleware layer that implements OpenGL ES over Vulkan.

GLOVE allows for OpenGL ES to be implemented on top of Vulkan drivers for Android, Linux, and Windows platforms. This allows for OpenGL ES support to be mapped over Vulkan just as DXVK maps Direct3D 11 to Vulkan or MoltenVK maps Vulkan on top of Apple's Metal API. With modern OpenGL ES sharing much in common with OpenGL, it provides much of what's needed by core OpenGL too, albeit not complete OpenGL 4 desktop. In the future they plan to support more desktop OpenGL as well as safety-critical OpenGL (OpenGL SC).

Among other use-cases, Think Silicon believes GLOVE will be important for running legacy GLES applications atop Vulkan-only stacks in the future as well as reducing the driver maintenance burden, etc. GLOVE is being open-sourced under the LGPLv3.

In an email to Phoronix, Think Silicon also shared that for many applications they even found their GLOVE middleware to be faster for OpenGL ES than native OpenGL ES hardware drivers.

More details on GLOVE can be found at Think-Silicon.com.