"Kopper" Merged Into Mesa As A Big Win For Zink

Merged into Mesa 22.1-devel this morning is Kopper, a big improvement particularly for the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver code.

Kopper (previously called "Copper" as well while in development) is designed to improve the efficiency of Zink for running OpenGL atop Vulkan. Kopper also allows for additional features like native WSI handling.

The more than two thousand lines of code adding the Kopper driver interface and all the associated plumbing and then Zink changes have been merged in time for Mesa 22.1, which will be branched next week. Zink with Kopper now provides native Vulkan windowing system integration (WSI), proper Vulkan swapchain handling, eliminating various environment variable workarounds previously required by Zink, and fixes up various other problems that plagued Zink to this point -- including rendering fixes for some scenarios.

This moves Zink closer to being able to run with a Wayland compositor and other features previously only dreamed about for this generic but performant OpenGL implementation for running on Vulkan drivers. Mike Blumenkrantz continues working on Zink/Mesa thanks to employment from Valve.

See this merge request for more details and while waiting to see what more Zink happenings may land for this quarter's Mesa 22.1 release.