Zink Now Supports OpenGL Compatibility Contexts - Allowing More Games/Apps To Work

In addition to Tuesday seeing the Zink sub-allocator merged for sharply improving the performance of this OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation within Mesa, the Zink Gallium3D code subsequently merged support for OpenGL compatibility contexts.

While Zink supports OpenGL 4.6 for a while now with the core GL contexts, it hasn't supported compatibility contexts. Creating an OpenGL compatibility context with supported drivers allows making use of legacy/deprecated GL functionality that is otherwise not available with the core context.

With Zink now supporting OpenGL compatibility contexts, this allows the OpenGL-on-Vulkan layer to work with all of the games and applications out there that rely on this compatibility mode.

The necessary pieces of Zink support for compatibility contexts has been in place but was held off on exposing it until the sub-allocator was in place for allowing more playable frame-rates with games.

The compatibility context support is at OpenGL 4.6, inline with the core context support. The change is in place for Mesa 21.3 due out in November~December as stable.

New Zink benchmarks with this latest code are currently running at Phoronix with results coming out in the next few days.