Last year Alyssa Rosenzweig joined Intel to work on their Linux graphics drivers after previously serving as a contractor for Valve on their graphics stack and also previously leading the Mesa driver work for the Asahi Linux Apple Silicon graphics support. Since joining Intel, she has been leading the development of Jay as a new SSA-based shader compiler for Intel graphics hardware to be used by the Mesa Iris Gallium3D and ANV Vulkan drivers.

When Jay was made public back in April, the open-source shader compiler paired with the Intel Mesa driver code was able to pass conformance testing on OpenGL ES 3.0 and OpenCL 3.0 but without any Vulkan conformance test suite (CTS) passes yet. With the newest Jay code merged this week for Mesa 26.3-devel, there is now Vulkan CTS conformance passes on both Xe2 and newest Xe3 graphics hardware.

A set of 63 patches were merged to Mesa Git on Friday for implementing more functionality into the Jay compiler, VRT optimizations, and bug fixes.

Alyssa Rosenzweig commented in the merge request :

"Excitingly this MR cleans out the last of the "hack - do not upstream" patches I've been carrying, so upstream should be essentially passing Vulkan CTS on Xe2 and Xe3 once this MR goes in."

Quite a milestone in less than a year. It will be interesting to see how far the Intel Jay compiler gets by the time of Mesa 26.3 releases in November and ultimately when Jay will be ready to serve as the default shader compiler for the open-source Intel Linux graphics drivers.