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

[Kenneth Graunke]

On 09/12/2012 02:09 PM, Andy Ritger wrote:
> There was some recent Khronos discussion about updating the OpenGL
> Implementer's Guide for Linux, to which Ian Romanick noted that this
> topic will be discussed at XDC as part of the broad "Discuss the future
> of EGL, GLX, and OpenGL ES on Linux" agenda item.
> 
> To help facilitate the XDC discussion, I've put together a straw-man
> proposal for an updated Linux OpenGL ABI.  I'm sending this out now to
> start generating feedback and ideas, to help make the XDC discussion as
> productive as possible.

Andy,

I haven't yet read through this completely, but everything I saw looks
fantastic.  A bunch of us on the Intel team have been talking about
separating out libGL into libGLX and libOpenGL for a few months now.
Having it in libGL just doesn't make sense these days: it's completely
reasonable to use GL + EGL, at which point GLX is useless, and having it
in libGL makes it (near?) impossible to use GLX + GLES.

We've even talked about deprecating GLX entirely, and encouraging
everyone to use EGL instead.  There's a lot of things about GLX that
just painful to deal with, and little work is being done to it.  EGL is
actively worked on and extended, cross platform, and from what I've seen
a nicer API to work with.

I like that you're trying to solve the vendor-specific libGL problem as
well.  Getting that right would definitely make life much easier both
for packagers and ultimately normal users.

Thanks for taking the initiative here; both for starting the discussion
and for writing up such a detailed (and spec-style!) proposal.

--Ken