[Mesa-dev] Mesa llvmpipe for WebGL software rendering

[Benoit Jacob]

----- Original Message -----
> On Tue, 28 Feb 2012 09:08:39 -0800 (PST), Benoit Jacob
> <bjacob at mozilla.com> wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> I'd rather see us create a software-only EGL platform.  It seems like
> it
> ought to be easier to maintain than the special OSMesa system that
> developers other than Brian Paul break, and provides a better-known
> API
> for interacting with the window system.  That also solves 1) by
> giving
> you an option at context setup, I think.

I agree wholeheartedly!

I only was interested in OSMesa as it used to be the way to get Mesa as a standalone library, and I wasn't sure if that was still the case. It seems that's no longer the case, and Mesa llvmpipe now gives drop-in replacements for real OpenGL libraries with WGL/GLX/etc so I don't seem to have a need for OSMesa anymore.

Replacing WGL/GLX/etc by EGL would be a further improvement from an application developer's perspective (having to deal WGL, GLX, CGL and EGL in Mozilla has been a cause of trouble) so I'd definitely welcome this. I'm aware that Mesa already offers EGL and we're still using GLX, but that is just inertia (from us relying on other X features).

Cheers,
Benoit


>