Linux OpenGL ABI discussion

[Dave Airlie]

>
> I think the single most important point is to explicitly disallow
> vendor-supplied libGL binaries in the LSB.  Every other LSB componenet
> relies on a single backing implementation for a reason, and in practice
> the Nvidia libGL just causes endless pain where people acceidentally
> link against it.  The DRI libGL should be declare the one and official
> one, and people who need extended features over it that aren't in the
> driver-specific backend will need to contribute them back.

I have to agree with Christoph, the libGL should be a
one-size-fits-all and capable of loading drivers from any vendor, I'm
not sure what is so hard about this apart from the fact that neither
vendor has seemed willing to help out infrastructure on the basis of
some belief that they shouldn't have to (maybe because they don't on
Windows) or maybe because they don't want to be seen to collaborate on
things.... there is hardly any major secrets in the libGL interface
that should stop it...

As far as I know idr did a lot of work recently on libGL so we can
expose GL extensions for vendors like ATI without them having to ship
their own driver (I'm not sure if ATI contributed anything more than a
list of things needed).. I think he mentioned this was a bit more
difficult for glx.. but I'm sure it should be possible...

This is as far as I know how MS's OpenGL ICD system works, there is
one frontend and your driver can expose extra things via it...

Dave.