Mesa 18.1 Receives OpenGL 3.1 With ARB_compatibility For Gallium3D Drivers

Written by Michael Larabel in Mesa on 23 February 2018 at 03:24 PM EST. 9 Comments
MESA
Going back to last October, Marek of AMD's open-source driver team has been working on ARB_compatibility support for Mesa with a focus on RadeonSI/Gallium3D. Today that work was finally merged.

The ARB_compatibility support allows use of deprecated/removed features of OpenGL by newer versions of the specification. ARB_compatibility is particularly useful for OpenGL workstation users where there are many applications notorious for relying upon compatibility contexts / deprecated GL functionality. But ARB_compatibility is also used by a handful of Linux games too.

All of Marek's compatibility patches have landed and the work is now enabled for OpenGL 3.1 with ARB_compatibility support. This change is for Mesa 18.1. Supported drivers of this are the Gallium3D-using NV50, NVC0, R600, RadeonSI, Softpipe, LLVMpipe, and SVGA.

It will be interesting to see if this enables some corporate users now to be able to switch from using the AMDGPU-PRO proprietary OpenGL driver to the open-source R600g/RadeonSI drivers.
Related News
About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

Popular News This Week