Mesa's VirGL For OpenGL Within VMs Now Supports Tessellation Shaders

It was just days ago that the VirGL driver stack -- which is used for supporting OpenGL hardware acceleration within guest VMs that is passed onto the host's driver -- picked up FP64 support while now its latest addition is ARB_tessellation_shader support.

With the latest Mesa Git and the VirGL renderer library code is updated (as well as your host OpenGL driver supporting GL4), there is now support for tessellation shaders. The support has landed in Mesa 18.2 Git for this popular OpenGL 4.0 feature.

ARB_tessellation_shader was the last requirement for VirGL from exposing OpenGL 4.0 officially and it's effectively at OpenGL 4.1 already, as covered in the previous article on Phoronix. But there are still a few extensions left like ARB_shader_atomic_counters and ARB_shader_image_load_store before hitting GL 4.2 and then much more work for the newer OpenGL revisions.

Great job though by David Airlie and those involved in VirGL for getting it this far over the past few years. Now to hope that the new Vulkan Virgl effort takes real shape this summer.