Zink's OpenGL Over Vulkan Implementation Aiming For Mesa 19.3 Integration

For the past year "Zink" has been in development as the OpenGL API implemented over Vulkan and done as a Gallium3D driver. That code by Collabora's Erik Faye-Lund will likely be merged to Mesa 19.3 in the coming weeks.

After talking about Zink the first time at last year's XDC, Erik Faye-Lund provided an update at this week's XDC 2019 event in Montreal. Zink remains focused on serving as a Gallium driver translating Gallium API calls into Vulkan, which for the main part means using the OpenGL state tracker to get a full OpenGL implementation running over Vulkan. At this time, OpenGL 2.1 / OpenGL ES 2.0 is supported but more extensions and various optimizations continue to be pursued.

Erik has sent out some prepatory patches to Mesa while the surprise from XDC2019 is that he hopes to have the code out for review for upstreaming in the weeks ahead. If the "next few weeks" target remains accurate and the Gallium driver code review goes smoothly, this means it could end up in Mesa 19.3 with its feature cut-off in February and the official Mesa 19.3 release likely out in early December.

Besides Collabora being involved with Zink, Erik noted that "several companies" are working on Zink. This does appear to include the likes of Google that are moving towards a Vulkan-focused Android environment.

The update on Zink pre-merge can be found via this slide deck (PDF) from XDC 2019 Montreal.