[Xcb] XCB and OpenGL, help and/or project ideas wanted

[Barton C Massey]

Great to hear from you!  Wish it had been sooner, though.
The person you need to talk to is Kristof Ralovich
<kristof.ralovich at gmail.com>, who has already done quite a
bit of the work you propose to do with OpenGL, and is
currently working on more.

XCB input and internationalization needs a lot of help.  I'd
encourage you to look there also.

	Bart

In message <652830590906170453p1c521259i3f1d2ea280564254 at mail.gmail.com> you wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> a couple of weeks ago I started working with XCB and OpenGL, with my
> ambitious goal set to getting an XCB application working with hardware
> accelerated OpenGL 3.0. I quickly realized that it's not as easy as it
> seems (by looking at the xcb_glx functions that look exactly like the
> glX functions you usually use). My intent was to add necessary GLX
> extension bindings, etc for OpenGL 3 context creation to XCB-GLX. I
> actually did write some xml protocol descriptions for
> GLX_ARB_create_context and I got it partly working (glXSetClientInfoARB
> function has some quirky padding I can't figure out in xml so I didn't
> do it).
> 
> After a while I realized that XCB-GLX by itself cannot be used to set up
> a rendering context. For that you need the GLX api from your OpenGL
> implementation (from libGL.so). In addition to sending the normal X
> requests, the GLX API functions modify local client state that's hidden
> in libGL.so. The GLX API is closely tied to Xlib and there's no way to
> use it without Xlib.
> 
> I did figure out a quick and dirty workaround to use OpenGL with XCB. I
> was able to set up a rendering context using GLX 1.3 (fbconfigs instead
> of visuals) and GLX 1.4/OpenGL 3.0 (using GLX_ARB_create_context). I did
> this by using XCB-based Xlib, opening a Display with XOpenDisplay and
> then getting the XCB connection with XGetXCBConnection and acquiring
> event queue ownership with XSetEventQueueOwner. Then I used the Xlib
> Display with the glX* functions and XCB for creating a window, event
> handling, and everything else. However, it seems that an XCB-only
> application that uses OpenGL is not possible at the moment.
> 
> The solution would be to have an XCBified replacement for the GLX API,
> but since the GLX API is standardized, this is one of those 80%
> political 20% technical issues.
> 
> And now for the questions:
> 
> Can anyone verify my findings?
> 
> What is the general status of XCB/OpenGL at the moment and who is or has
> been working on it?
> 
> XCB-only OpenGL does not seem to be possible with proprietary graphics
> driver-provided OpenGL implementations, but what about Mesa? If it's
> possible, how do you set up a Mesa-OpenGL context with XCB? Are there
> any open source graphics drivers that can be used with XCB?
> 
> I'm kind of in a hairy situation at the moment, I am participating in a
> campaign called Kes=E4koodi (http://www.coss.fi/kesakoodi), which is
> similar to Google's Summer of Code. So I'm getting paid for three months
> to work on XCB. My project is supposed to be XCB/OpenGL, but I guess
> it's not that restricted.
> 
> So, now that I'm stuck, I'd like to hear about ideas on how to go on. If
> there's nothing on XCB/OpenGL, another XCB-related project will do.
> 
> X Input methods/internationalized text input could be an intresting
> project to work on, what's the status of that on XCB?
> 
> Thanks for any help,
> -Riku Salminen
> project blog: http://kesakoodi2k9.wordpress.com/
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