Zink Is Almost In Mesa For Offering OpenGL 2.1 / GLES 2.0 Over Vulkan

Zink is the year-old effort led by Collabora's Erik Faye-Lund on developing a Mesa driver that maps OpenGL over Vulkan. It's now nearly within Mesa pending the merge request to actually add it.

In the few weeks since the Zink update at XDC 2019, Erik has been working to get all the necessary Mesa/Gallium/NIR changes merged that are prerequisites for actually introducing this OpenGL over Vulkan driver. All that prep work is now in place for Mesa 19.3 and now just left is the merge request actually introducing the new Gallium3D driver. The MR was opened last week and will hopefully be all reviewed and accepted prior to Mesa 19.3's feature freeze in November.

The Zink driver in its current form supports OpenGL 2.1 and OpenGL ES 2.0 over Vulkan. After Zink is in mainline Mesa, Erik will ultimately go after OpenGL 3.x/4.x and OpenGL ES 3.0 but that is still likely to be a ways out.

More details on the latest Zink state via the Collabora blog.