Experimental Zink Patches Get OpenGL 4.6 Running Atop Vulkan

When the Zink Gallium3D driver running OpenGL over Vulkan was first introduced in 2018 and since one of the main blockers besides the performance overhead has been the limited OpenGL 2/3 support. The GL3/GL4 support has been improving with time for Zink and when making use of the latest out-of-tree patches is even possible to get OpenGL 4.6 running over Vulkan with Zink!

Mike Blumenkrantz who formerly worked at Samsung OSG on the likes of Enlightenment and Wayland has been spending this summer out of employment and focusing on Mesa/Zink as in part a learning experiment. He along with developers from Collabora and the community have been pushing forward this generic OpenGL-over-Vulkan implementation.

It was just two months ago we were talking about OpenGL 3.1 for Zink while with Mike's latest development tree is work taking this software implementation all the way to OpenGL 4.6.

Blumenkrantz shared that the work is pending for not only OpenGL 4.6 but also OpenGL ES 3.2 compatibility. He's currently seeing a 91% pass rate for the Piglit regression tests, as outlined on his blog.

Currently he is at around 300 patches on his personal Mesa branch, so it may take some time before all of this work will be cleaned up, reviewed, and ultimately merged. Those interested in OpenGL 4.6 over Vulkan/Zink can find the tentative work via zink-wip.