ZINK: OpenGL Over Vulkan Comes As New Mesa Gallium3D Driver

Collabora has been developing a new "Zink" Gallium3D driver for Mesa that gets OpenGL running over Vulkan.

While Google has been working on OpenGL ES translations over Vulkan, VKGL for core OpenGL over Vulkan as a user-space translation library, and also GLOVE for OpenGL ES over Vulkan, there is a new option in development with Zink.

Zink is being developed by Collabora's Erik Faye-Lund as a Gallium3D driver for getting OpenGL running over Vulkan. Zink is still in the early stages of development but with a goal of at least getting some GL apps running over Vulkan. But don't get too excited yet as at this stage of the bring-up they are only faking OpenGL 2.1 support.

Zink is building off of Mesa's existing OpenGL code, the NIR intermediate representation, Glslang, and other components so the bring-up should be faster than projects pursuing OpenGL-over-Vulkan from scratch.

The code is being developed for now in this Git branch and we should here more about Collabora's plans for Zink later this week at XDC2018 -- the Zink effort wasn't officially announced yet but was tipped off by a Phoronix reader.