Intel's OpenGL Mesa Drivers Now In Good Shape For External Objects

Over the past year developers from Igalia, Collabora, and others have been involved in bringing up support for the OpenGL EXT_external_objects extension within the Intel open-source drivers. That work is now squared away as one of the pieces for offering better interoperability between OpenGL and Vulkan.

Last month the EXT_external_objects support for the Intel Iris Gallium3D driver was merged. Additionally, merged a few weeks back was EXT_external_objects support for the aging i965 Mesa driver that continues providing OpenGL support for pre-Broadwell hardware.

EXT_external_objects is the extension to OpenGL for introducing memory objects and semaphores for dealing with these concepts brought on by Vulkan. With the EXT_external_objects work, an OpenGL game/application allows importing of a Vulkan memory object.

While the work is mainlined for handling EXT_external_objects by the Intel Mesa drivers, corner cases / bugs continue to be addressed. More details on the effort via this blog post by Collabora who is engaging in the work from their side due to Google's Chrome OS.

On the AMD side, the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver also has the EXT_memory_object and EXT_semaphore support for external objects while the other drivers are still lacking.