LLVMpipe Has Patches Bringing It To OpenGL 4.5 Support

For years Mesa's LLVMpipe software rasterizer has been bound to OpenGL 3.3 support but finally in recent months Red Hat's David Airlie has been tackling OpenGL 4.x support... Right now in Mesa it's at OpenGL 4.3 but there are patches seemingly to be mainlined very soon that will take it up to OpenGL 4.5.

As it stands right now, Mesa 20.2 will ship in a few weeks with OpenGL 4.3 support for LLVMpipe rather than OpenGL 4.3. But David Airlie has continued hacking away at the missing GL4 features and now has this LLVM-powered software OpenGL driver hitting OpenGL 4.5 with patches under review.

Even more exciting, Airlie hopes to see these patches mainlined for Mesa 20.2 whether it be the initial release or a later point release.

This merge request is tracking the LLVMpipe patches for hitting OpenGL 4.5 and hitting the OpenGL CTS (Conformance Test Suite). As of Sunday, he has seemingly the last fix for OpenGL 4.5 support so it's possible the work will be mainlined quite soon and thus hopeful for Mesa 20.2 backporting.

Hitting OpenGL 4.6 will presumably require more time due to the GL_ARB_gl_spirv (and related GL_ARB_spirv_extensions) for SPIR-V consumption to better jive in a Vulkan world. But that too could still come together nicely as Airlie has also been working on Vallium as a software Vulkan implementation and possible shared code re-use.