Mesa 22.0 Zink Lands macOS Build Fix For OpenGL On Vulkan Via MoltenVK On Metal

Last year there was some work for getting Gallium3D Zink working on macOS for this OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation to in turn run it atop the MoltenVK library for translating the Vulkan calls to Apple's Metal graphics/compute API. That work fell into disrepair but now the fixed up code for allowing Zink to build on Apple's operating system has been merged into Mesa 22.0.

This patch was merged to Mesa 22.0-devel today to fix building of the Zink code on macOS. There are changes to adapt to DMA-BUF not being available on macOS, changes for MoltenVK use, and additional build arguments necessary.

Mesa's build dependencies on macOS can be installed via Brew and then Mesa can be configured with the appropriate build options for MoltenVK usage and Zink to get things successfully building on macOS. More details in this merge request.

There likely are far more bugs for Zink on macOS than Linux especially with having to go through MoltenVK to Metal, but interesting effort nevertheless and will be important if Apple ends up removing the OpenGL support completely from its current deprecated but still available state.

Zink on Linux made remarkable progress this year with OpenGL 4.6 support and performance that is increasingly competitive to the native OpenGL hardware drivers. From the end of November see Zink Is Ending 2021 In Fantastic Shape For OpenGL Over Vulkan.