My guess it, it's a sign of Mesa reaching the point where developing Vulkan driver leveraging SPIR-V to NIR translation gives hardware vendors benefits they don

My guess it, it's a sign of Mesa reaching the point where developing Vulkan driver leveraging SPIR-V to NIR translation gives hardware vendors benefits they don't get trying to invent their own approaches. They focus on NIR to their machine code compiler part and Mesa does the rest of heavy lifting for them. Plus OpenGL support comes basically as a free bonus through zink. Likely, it's not that they suddenly started liking FOSS, but they can sell it to their bean counters as a cost benefit which happens to be a great thing for Linux ecosystem of course. More about why NIR could play an important role here: https://www.jlekstrand.net/jason/blog/2022/01/in-defense-of-nir/ https://www.jlekstrand.net/jason/blog/2022/01/in-defense-of-...