Mesa 19.1 To Expose EXT_gpu_shader4 Support

While it's not looking like Mesa 19.1 will end up exposing OpenGL 4.6 capabilities, it is picking up various other extensions including some prominent several year old extensions like EXT_texture_buffer_object and the decade old EXT_gpu_shader4.

Presumably to satisfy some enterprise/workstation customer use-cases, prominent RadeonSI Gallium3D driver developer Marek Olšák of AMD merged a lengthy series of patches on Wednesday adding EXT_gpu_shader4 and EXT_texture_buffer_object. These new extensions will work with Mesa drivers supporting OpenGL 3.1 or higher.

EXT_gpu_shader4 was the originally NVIDIA developed extension during the GeForce 8 days to extend GLSL for providing new texture lookup functions, full signed integer / unsigned integer support for GLSL, and other mandated bits. EXT_texture_buffer_object was for introducing buffer textures and was done in Mesa as a requirement for EXT_gpu_shader4.

So some next month's Mesa 19.1 release, EXT_gpu_shader4 is in place for these modern open-source OpenGL drivers.