Intel's OpenGL Driver Will Now Make Better Use Of KHR_debug For Shader Debugging

Intel's Mesa OpenGL driver has been supporting KHR_debug as required by OpenGL 4.3+, but without making full use of the extension. Now though to help with the shader debugging process, it will be exposing more information via this OpenGL debugging extension.

KHR_debug provides the framework for allowing OpenGL drivers to notify applications/games of different events that are useful for debugging and performance profiling, such as warnings and other information. Up to now the Intel driver has just been dumping shader assembly and other data to the standard output error stream but now a patch series is pending for exposing more of that data via the KHR_debug extension. This allows for a cleaner and more sane approach for debugging OpenGL shaders with the Intel driver and can easily integrate into the various GL debugging/profiling applications.

With 11 patches posted on Friday, the Intel driver can provide the GLSL IR representation of shaders via KHR_debug as well as the shader assembly, the shader cache, and NIR. Presumably this work will land in time for the Mesa 19.0 release due out early next year.