Intel Vulkan Driver Sees Fixes To Improve OpenGL-On-Vulkan Zink Compatibility

The open-source Intel ANV Vulkan driver has recently been seeing improvements around better handling the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver.

Intel driver engineer Paulo Zanoni landed on Monday a set of fixes and improvements to the ANV driver's Vulkan sparse support. Zanoni commented:

"Now that we finally merged MSAA support, here are some patches that will move the progress of some Zink failures forward and also round a few corners.

If you combine this series with !29197, you'll see some subtests of Zink tests start passing."

That other noted merge request is an open change by Zink lead developer Mike Blumenkrantz as a means to disable the 2D_VIEW_COMPATIBLE+sparse functionality. This "fixes a lot of stuff on Intel" for improving this OpenGL API implementation built over the Vulkan API.

At least for the Intel ANV driver sparse fixes/improvements that work is now merged. It's good seeing Zink activity/progress happening on the Intel Vulkan Linux driver beyond all of the AMD and NVIDIA changes in the past. Intel for the time being continues maintaining their Iris Gallium3D driver for OpenGL support on new hardware but eventually there will become a time when the hardware vendors just start focusing on Vulkan hardware driver support and rely on the likes of Zink for legacy OpenGL support.

Hopefully by the time of the Mesa 24.2 release in August there will be pleasant Intel ANV driver support for Zink.