Mesa's LLVMpipe Flips On ARB_gl_spirv, Help Sought For Lavapipe Windows Port

Mesa's LLVMpipe OpenGL software driver has now enabled ARB_gl_spirv and ARB_spirv_extensions, which now rounds it out of the major extensions needed to advertise OpenGL 4.6.

This OpenGL software driver building atop LLVM and Gallium3D now handles the OpenGL SPIR-V extensions for being able to ingest SPIR-V shaders. The SPIR-V support was one of the big additions for OpenGL 4.6.

With this commit today the SPIR-V support is flipped on for LLVMpipe and turns out to work fine. LLVMpipe is now nearly rounded out on supporting all major OpenGL functionality for the CPU-based execution. Granted, don't expect too much out of the performance for those thinking LLVMpipe can be used for running games on today's CPUs.

Lavapipe that is to Vulkan as LLVMpipe is to OpenGL continues evolving as well. Recently a developer has been working on a port of Lavapipe to Windows as a CPU-based Vulkan driver. That independent developer issued a call for help/interest on the Mesa mailing list for anyone else interested in seeing Lavapipe on Windows. Those interested in that effort can learn more via Gitlab.