Core Mesa Now Implements OpenGL 4.0, Nearly At OpenGL 4.1~4.2

Wow, it's like a dream... Waking up to find that Mesa Git now supports all of the necessary GL extensions to claim OpenGL 4.0 compliance by core Mesa. It took more than five years, but it's finally materializing and OpenGL 4.1~4.2 isn't too far behind.

Last night Mesa received OpenGL 4.0's tessellation support for RadeonSI. Since that last article on Phoronix, Ilia Mirkin has been landing some tessellation-related work for the Nouveau (NVC0) Gallium3D driver.

Meanwhile, David Airlie added the shader sub-routine support! ARB_shader_subroutine was the last extension needed by core Mesa for OpenGL 4.0.

While core Mesa claims OpenGL 4.0 compliance now, the state of the individual drivers do vary. Nouveau's NVC0 Fermi/Kepler driver is in great shape followed by the Intel i965 DRI driver with Haswell or better, and then the RadeonSI / R600 drivers. For Nouveau NV50, LLVMpipe, Softpipe, and the other niche drivers there is still much more work left.

We're now just one extension away from having OpenGL 4.1 compliance too, which is for the GL_ARB_shader_precision extension. There are already patches public for that and it's possible the work could land soon for the next Mesa release. Blocking OpenGL 4.2 compliance is ARB_shader_image_load_store, which there are patches for too.

It looks like Mesa 10.7 will end up being renamed to Mesa 11.0 for its release in September. Some discussion about this monumental milestone is already happening in this forum thread.

UPDATE: More details here.