Zink OpenGL On Vulkan Now Supports OpenGL 4.2 With Mesa 21.1

It was just earlier this month that mainline Mesa achieved OpenGL 4.1 for Zink, the Gallium3D driver allowing OpenGL to be implemented atop Vulkan. Now OpenGL 4.2 support is in place for this promising Mesa component.

Going back to last summer there have been patches experimentally taking Zink as far as OpenGL 4.6 albeit it's been a lengthy process getting all of the relevant patches upstreamed. Additionally, some patches have required reworking or proper adjustments after going through the conformance test suite to ensure they are up to scratch for merging. Thanks to that ongoing effort by Mike Blumenkrantz working under contract for Valve and the work by Collabora developers, it was a quick jump this month from seeing OpenGL 4.1 to OpenGL 4.2 in mainline.

As of today, OpenGL 4.2 is now exposed for Zink running on Mesa 21.1-devel.

It will be fun to see how much further the Zink OpenGL support gets for mainline by the time of Mesa 21.1's release in Q2.