[Mesa-dev] Mesa llvmpipe for WebGL software rendering

[Benoit Jacob]

Hi List,

At Mozilla we've been wondering if we could get a good software fallback for users who can't get hardware-accelerated WebGL. Mesa llvmpipe seems like the best open source OpenGL renderer, right? At least, it performed superbly in our quick tests.

Questions:
 
 1. Is it possible for the application to choose between Mesa renderers? Ideally I would like to be able to evaluate the driver blacklist, and depending on that, use either the default renderer or Mesa llvmpipe. Is that possible?

 2. Related question: are you planning to update OSMesa, base it on llvmpipe? Last I checked, OSMesa was based on swrast from an old Mesa version. An updated OSMesa would offer a great solution to question 1. 

 3. On GNU/Linux: why isn't Mesa llvmpipe installed by default by most distros? Is there a real reason or is it just that nobody asked for it, or nobody saw a need for it? Trying to figure if llvmpipe installed by default everywhere (on Linux) is something we can realistically hope for.

 4. On Windows, which is where we have the biggest problems with outdated drivers, is Mesa/llvmpipe available? What form does it take? (Question 2. would offer an answer to this, OSMesa...)

Cheers,
Benoit