VMware's SVGA Gallium3D Driver Lands OpenGL 4.3 Support In Mesa 22.0

VMware has been preparing support for OpenGL 4.3 to be exposed within their VMware virtualization software so that guest VMs can enjoy newer OpenGL support that is accelerated by the host.

With Linux 5.17 the VMware "VMWGFX" DRM kernel driver has the necessary kernel-side bits for OpenGL 4.3 to be exposed by VMware's guest virtual machines. Now in Mesa 22.0-devel, the user-space portion for OpenGL 4.3 with VMware's SVGA Gallium3D driver is now wired up. The remaining portion is updated VMware hypervisor software for exposing the updated virtual device.

This merge request landed into Mesa 22.0-devel on Tuesday for the OpenGL 4.3 SVGA driver side changes. The patches have been tested internally at VMware to verify support for the future GL43-capable SVGA device.

OpenGL 4.3 is an important milestone since it gets compute shaders going along with an assortment of other notable extensions like KHR_debug and image views.