[Mesa-dev] Standalone gbm and generic backends?

[Damian Hobson-Garcia]

Hello Ander and Jammy,

Looking through the mesa-dev archives I came across your discussion
about the possibility of splitting gbm into a separate project/archive:

http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/mesa-dev/2014-April/057609.html

I was wondering if there are any further comments or ideas about the
feasibility of splitting gbm out, leaving just the backend
implementations in Mesa.  I agree with Jammy's comments about how this
can be useful for binary EGL/ES2.0 drivers on ARM platforms.

With projects like Wayland/Weston (specifically Weston) using the gbm
frontend, it seems like it would be very useful to have the platform
independent front separate from the dependent backend.

One obstacle to this is the fact that currently the backends require
including gbmint.h, to wrap the various gbm structs with extended
versions used by the backend.  Since this file is not included in any of
the devel packages (I am assuming the "int" stands for internal). It
doesn't seem too difficult (though maybe a bit time-consuming) to
refactor this dependency out, or maybe just export the necessary bits
from gbmint.h.

Are there other potential problems with this kind of separation that
come to mind?

Than you,
Damian