[Mesa-dev] Can't get OpenGL 3.x inside VMware Workstation 12 (Ubuntu guest)

[Thomas Hellstrom]

On 11/11/2015 07:07 PM, Brian Paul wrote:
> On 11/11/2015 10:44 AM, Emil Velikov wrote:
>> On 11 November 2015 at 16:48, Brian Paul <brianp at vmware.com> wrote:
>>> On 11/11/2015 08:44 AM, Emil Velikov wrote:
>>
>>>>
>>>> I have seen similar type of documents in the past, most of which going
>>>> out of date very quickly due to distribution changes and/or others.
>>>> Wondering how you'll feel about "check your distro and add svga to the
>>>> gallium-drivers array" style of instructions ?
>>>
>>>
>>> I'm afraid I don't quite understand what you're saying there.  Can you
>>> elaborate?
>>>
>>>
>> Rather than walking through the requirements, configure and make/make
>> install steps, just forward people to the distro specific wiki on "how
>> to build mesa/kernel" and explicitly mention the differences:
>> mesa:
>> - XA must be enabled: --enable-xa
>> - svga must be listed in the gallium drivers:
>> --with-gallium-drivers=svga...
>>
>> kernel:
>>   - Set DRM_VMWGFX
>>
>> others...
>
> I guess I've never seen those wikis.  I'd have to search for them, but
> I really don't have the time now.
>
> We actually have an in-house shell script that installs all the
> pre-req packages, pulls the git trees, builds and installs for a
> variety of guest OSes.  But it has some VMware-specific stuff that I'd
> have to trim out before making public.
>
>
>>
>> Related: does the upstream [1] vmwgfx module work well when combined
>> with upstream core drm across different versions ? Considering how
>> well Thomas is handling upstreaming shouldn't the module from the
>> kernel be recommended ?
>
> Either should be fine at this point but the build instructions cover
> the case of one having an older distro that may not have the
> GL3-enabled kernel module already.
>

The upstream[1] vmwgfx module should work well with any linux kernel
dating back to 2.6.32 unless the distro has changed the kernel API from
the base version. It ships with builtin stripped drm and ttm to handle
compatibility issues, and is intended for people (mostly including
ourselves and our QA team) that want to try out new features without
installing a completely new kernel.

/Thomas