OpenGL 4.6 / SPIR-V Support Might Be Inching Closer For Mesa Drivers

We're quickly approaching the two year anniversary of the OpenGL 4.6 release and it's looking like the Intel/RadeonSI drivers might be inching towards the finish line for that latest major revision of the graphics API.

As we've covered many times, the Mesa drivers have been held up on OpenGL 4.6 support due to their SPIR-V ingestion support mandated by this July 2017 version of the OpenGL specification. While there are the Intel and Radeon RADV Vulkan drivers already with the SPIR-V support that is central to Vulkan, it's taken a long time re-fitting the OpenGL drivers for the likes of ARB_gl_spirv. Then again, there aren't many (actually, any?) major OpenGL games requiring version 4.6 of the specification even with its interoperability benefits thanks to SPIR-V.

There's been the OpenGL 4.6 / SPIR-V patches on the mailing list and Gitlab for review for what seems like a long time, but little action to get it across the finish line. A Phoronix reader tipped us off on Thursday that the SPIR-V milestone (and thus OpenGL 4.6) may finally be getting closer.

Valve open-source developer Timothy Arceri merged a refine version of one of the patches that is part of the ARB_gl_spirv merge request. This code restructures some of the Mesa GLSL linker code so that it's greatly cleaned up, albeit not wiring in any of the new SPIR-V bits.

Here's to hoping the Intel and RadeonSI drivers can reach OpenGL 4.6 in mainline Mesa prior to the two year anniversary on 31 July... This would put the open-source OpenGL 4.6 driver support for the Mesa 19.2 release due out in late August.