OpenGL and Vulkan applications can now talk to each other with Mesa drivers

Not specifically gaming related but we love to cover industry stuff too, that might be interesting for some of our more technically minded users. Collabora have mentioned that thanks to work done on Mesa, OpenGL and Vulkan applications can now talk to each other.

While Vulkan is the next-generation, and eventually anything that wants performance will move over from OpenGL like applications, game engines and games - this all takes time. The bigger games especially, often taking a great many years and an API switch isn't an easy thing. However, what if some parts could gradually move to Vulkan while keeping other bits OpenGL?

This is being done now thanks to the EXT_external_objects extension, which has been worked on by the likes of Igalia, Collabora and others. The push for this is Chromium OS but could easily have use cases across standard desktop Linux too of course.

Bringing this feature to i965 and Iris allows Mesa to keep being a competitive player in the graphics world and merging this feature in allows for a very exciting future!

Rohan Garg, Collabora

See the blog post on Collabora.