Mike Blumenkrantz of Valve's Linux graphics driver team has landed support for mesh shaders within Mesa's LLVMpipe software driver.

A five month old [1]merge request that began as non-working code has matured and made it for landing in Mesa 26.1. EXT_mesh_shader is now enabled for this CPU-based OpenGL software implementation for offering mesh shaders and task shader support. This mesh shader extension [2]came together last year for OpenGL as a cross-vendor solution. The extension was [3]added to the OpenGL Registry back in October and for Mesa 26.0 [4]RadeonSI landed its mesh shader support while now LLVMpipe is ready too.

In addition to enabling GL_EXT_mesh_shader for LLVMpipe, the newly-merged code also now [5]exposes GLSL 4.60 for LLVMpipe as seemingly an oversight until now. GLSL 4.50 was only exposed by LLVMpipe while now GLSL 4.60 is advertised. Blumenkrantz remarked, " not sure why this was missing. "



[1] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/merge_requests/37408

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/news/OpenGL-GL_EXT_mesh_shader

[3] https://www.phoronix.com/news/OpenGL-October-2025-Extensions

[4] https://www.phoronix.com/news/RadeonSI-Mesh-Shaders-Mesa-26.0

[5] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/merge_requests/37408/diffs?commit_id=b33838268fe6b5827c8344e7fe23dc09c214535f