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On 10/06/2015 12:43 PM, Emil Velikov wrote:<br>
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<pre wrap="">On 6 October 2015 at 16:39, Kyle Brenneman <a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:kbrenneman@nvidia.com"><kbrenneman@nvidia.com></a> wrote:
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<pre wrap="">On 10/06/2015 07:34 AM, Emil Velikov wrote:
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Hello Kyle,
A few questions/points of discussion:
* What is your take on having a libglvnd 'package', which provides
the headers (and maybe other materials), apart from the libraries ?
I'm basically thinking about OpenGL.h, GLX.h, etc for programs that
wish to use new ABI, and glvnd{Foo,Bar}.h which mesa and other GL
implementations.
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I haven't looked much into packaging yet. I'm open to any suggestions that
might make that easier, though.
One thing that I'm planning to do but haven't gotten to yet is to move the
public headers into a separate directory. There's a couple of header files
(libglxabi.h and GLdispatchABI.h) that are intended to be used by vendor
library implementations, and the other headers are all internal.
The headers that you'd use for compiling an application (gl.h, glx.h, etc.)
could easily go into a separate package, too.
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<pre wrap="">By 'packaging' I meant that the relevant files are available after
`make install'. Currently for GLdispatchABI.h and others that's not
the case. We can leave it up-to the distributions to manage the actual
packages (if in doubt a document to guide them), but we can make sure
that the files (including pkg-config and cmake ones, separate set for
user/developer) are there.
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The 'make install' command currently doesn't do anything with the
regular GL headers. I would expect that if someone's building an
OpenGL application, then they've probably already installed some
version of the GL headers separately. Still, I could probably add a
configure option or something to include them.<br>
<br>
Including the public ABI headers in a "make install" does sound like
a good idea. Maybe put them next to the normal GL headers, or under
a GLVND subdirectory?<br>
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<pre wrap=""> * (Slightly out of scope here) Has there been any plans to have an
interop between vendors' GL implementations ? I am leaning towards
'nearly impossible' and 'with limited to no interest from the
different vendors'.
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It hasn't come up yet. Most of the design focuses on keeping the different
vendor libraries separate from one another.
My first inclination would be that any form of interop between vendor
libraries would be outside the scope of libglvnd itself. Without a specific
case for how that should work (for example, how a vendor library finds and
decides which other vendor library to talk to), it's better left as a
separate interface.
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<pre wrap="">I was wondering if it was worth mentioning this, with Vulkan in the
works. Afaict, the latter of which should support these kind of
things, out of the box.
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* There was an idea to expose separate libOpenGL libraries, one for
each (major?) GL version.
What happened on that front ?
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Nothing as far as I know.
However, each of those libraries is basically just a thin wrapper around
libGLdispatch.so, so in theory you could define any number of libraries that
just export a different set of functions. It's more a question of how many
libraries we'd want to deal with.
>From an application standpoint, having a fixed set of libraries with a known
set of exported functions seems like the easiest option, since you could
then link your application against it and not have to modify it later.
That said, the set of functions to export from libGL.so and libOpenGL.so is
still an open question. The set right now is just what libglvnd inherited
from Mesa, but it would be good to have a more clearly-defined set. Maybe
something simple like all core OpenGL functions through version 4.5 or so?
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<pre wrap="">I'm rather inclined towards "(ideally) no GL symbols should be
statically available" - just use *gl*GetProcAddress. Otherwise thing
are bound to get quite hairy.
- Forward/backward compatibility
- Incorrectly linked - program uses GL N, yet linked against GL N+1.
- Developer confusion - which library do I need, how do I check for X
and not Y.
- The easy way out - using GL N core function glFoo, link against GL
N, rather than LG N-1 + doing the extension check.
Note that libGL.so from older mesa was exposing a few too many symbols
statically, so we might want to make sure these/similar changes landed
in libglvnd.
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libGLX.so itself only exports GLX 1.4 functions -- no extensions and
no OpenGL functions. If an app developer wants to, they could link
against only libGLX.so, and then use glXGetProcAddress to look up
every OpenGL function.<br>
<br>
libOpenGL.so is there to avoid the hassle of having looking up every
OpenGL function, especially in simpler apps that don't need to use
many extension functions.<br>
<br>
Developer confusion is why I think it would be best to define a set
of functions to export and just stick with it. As long as the set of
exported functions stays consistent between versions, then a
developer can rely on it without getting missing or duplicate symbol
errors every time a new libglvnd version comes along.<br>
<br>
For backward compatibility with existing applications, libGL.so and
libGLES*.so would still need to be there, but those might have a
different set of exports than libOpenGL.so. By the spec, libGL.so
only exports OpenGL 1.2 functions, but most libGL.so implementations
out there export a lot more, and some buggy apps depend on that.<br>
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* The existing x11glvnd extension seems to be a "xserver only" approach.
Iirc at XDC last year, people were leaning towards using an FD to
obtain all the information needed. Currently mesa/xserver uses that to
detect if we should load i915, i965, r300, r600... driver. What's your
take on this ?
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I'm open to alternatives, but I'm not familiar with the FD approach you're
describing. Can you give me more details about it, or point me at where in
the Mesa code it is?
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<pre wrap="">The idea is that you can get the device(node) fd from the server
(x,weston,foo) and use that to communicate with the module and/apply
any form of heuristics. Currently mesa has a few:
- get the kernel module name (via ioctls or sysfs) and map it to the
userspace driver.
- get the vendor/device pciid (via libudev or sysfs), and map it to
the userspace driver.
The code is in src/loader, it's a bit hard to look at, so be warned.
I've been planning to nuke the ioctl vs sysfs vs libudev, by pushing
the chaos to libdrm. So that others can reuse it when needed. yet it's
not the most interesting thing to do bth.</pre>
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The only thing that libGLX can assume is that each X screen
corresponds to at most one vendor library. A vendor library might be
libdrm-based or might not. It might be a purely software-based
implementation that doesn't even use the GLX extension, or it might
only offer indirect rendering with no hardware-specific support.<br>
<br>
The x11glvnd extension will (by default) hand back the name of
whatever video driver is driving a screen. For cases where multiple
vendor names should all use the same vendor library, all the
different names would just be symlinks to the same library. So for
example, you might have have libGLX_mesa.so as the library, and then
you'd have symlinks to it named libGLX_intel.so, libGLX_vesa.so, and
so on.<br>
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Cheers,
Emil
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