Khronos Opens Door For Allowing More Open-Source Drivers To Reach Conformance Status

Khronos president Neil Trevett was at this month's XDC2019 conference in Montreal and he clarified their position on accepting conformance submissions by the open-source drivers.

He clarified that any of the open-source driver projects working on a conformant implementation for OpenGL / OpenCL / Vulkan can indeed submit to Khronos without paying any vendor fees, etc. That includes all drivers, just not those part of (or not) Khronos Group members.

While The Khronos Group has been good about open-sourcing their conformance test suites (CTS) in recent years, there are fees normally involved in the actual conformance process that are confirmed now to be waived for all open-source driver projects. This conformance process confirmation is particularly good news for projects like Nouveau that are only loosely community organized without the official support of NVIDIA.

X.Org's Daniel Vetter has confirmed the process and more details can be found via the X.Org Wiki. The conformance process will also accept software-only renderers like say LLVMpipe.