More Intel OpenGL 4.6 SPIR-V Code Lands In Mesa 18.1 Git

It looks like we're getting quite close to finally having OpenGL 4.6 in mainline Mesa.

Igalia developers that have been assisting the Intel OTC crew on OpenGL 4.6 support for the i965 GL driver have landed their latest round of SPIR-V patches. Solely left blocking OpenGL 4.6 for Intel (and RadeonSI) has been the ARB_gl_spirv / ARB_spirv_extensions OpenGL extensions for allowing the SPIR-V IR to be ingested by the OpenGL drivers for greater cross-operability with Vulkan. These latest patches now in Mesa 18.1-devel are landing i965 SPIR-V bits.

This includes the i965 driver now initializing SPIR-V capabilities calling the respective SPIR-V to NIR function rather than GLSL to NIR when hitting SPIR-V shaders within the OpenGL driver, support for linking SPIR-V shaders, etc.

It's looking quite close like perhaps Intel could have OpenGL 4.6 come the Mesa 18.1 release next quarter, but we'll have to wait and see. RadeonSI continues working on their GL 4.6 / SPIR-V support too and as part of that the RadeonSI NIR back-end.