[Mesa-dev] Proposal for an Updated Linux OpenGL ABI, again

[Andy Ritger]

Hi all,

Last fall, I put together a proposal for an updated Linux OpenGL ABI
specification:

    https://github.com/aritger/linux-opengl-abi-proposal/blob/master/linux-opengl-abi-proposal.txt

but then got distracted.  I'd like to try to resurrect the discussion.

>From the earlier email thread and some discussion at XDC2012, it sounded
like people thought the general ideas were reasonable.  However, there are
a variety of details to work through, called out in the issues section.

To get things moving, I thought I, and a few others from NVIDIA, would
try to prototype some of the vendor-neutral API Libraries described in the
document.  That might give us all something more concrete to play with.

Feedback on anything in the full proposal welcome, but here are a few
more specific questions:

* For a prototype, what is a reasonable version of OpenGL to provide
  in libOpenGL.so.1?  There are a variety of options enumerated in the
  full proposal for how to handle sets of entry points, but my sense is
  that the simplest solution is for libOpenGL.so.1 to provide a reasonable
  base version of OpenGL, and then all entry points for extensions and
  later OpenGL versions to be accessed through {egl,glX}GetProcAddress.

* From some initial reading, Mesa's glapi (src/mapi/glapi/) looks useful
  for the basis of libOpenGL.so.1's dispatching.  Would it be reasonable
  to use glapi in the prototype libOpenGL.so.1?

* The vendor-neutral libEGL.so.1 is intended to be a thin layer that
  would dispatch to the appropriate vendor.  It looks like the frontend of
  Mesa's EGL implementation would be a good basis for the vendor-neutral
  libEGL.so.1.  Would it be reasonable to use that for the prototype?

Thanks,
- Andy