Classic OSMesa Retires In Mesa 21.0 As The Worst Of The Software Rendering Paths

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Classic OSMesa Retires In Mesa 21.0 As The Worst Of The Software Rendering Paths

While working on some core Mesa cleaning/improvements, Eric Anholt has retired the classic OSMesa support in next quarter's Mesa 21.0...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Classic-OSMesa-Retires

[tildearrow]

OSMesa would have been useful if it allowed using the graphics card...

[skeevy420]

OSMesa would have been useful if it allowed using the graphics card...

OSMesaGetDethBuffer

That is all. You can take it from here.

[microcode]

FWIW, I think the interesting and obscure uses of OSMesa are perfectly happy with older versions of Mesa at this point. OSMesa is best suited for using OpenGL slowly on DOS, and Mesa 20 and earlier should be fine for that.

[nanonyme]

Are there other real consumers of OSMesa than Wine?

[jjmcwill2003]

Are there other real consumers of OSMesa than Wine?

Consider a Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) environment where an engineer wants to run a bunch of iterative simulations (solver runs) on their HPC cluster or cloud, then have an automated post processor generate reports based on those runs. In the report, they want to render a 3D model of the simulation showing failures or problem areas.

It's a server based "background" task with no direct access to the GPU hardware, so the OpenGL renderer has to use OS Mesa to render the model, then capture a "screenshot" of the rendering to JPEG for including in a web report, PDF report, or whatever.

And before you suggest some of the new APIs that expose the GPU hardware to a non-console process so that they can create an offscreen rendercontext, the HPC cluster or cloud compute instance may not even have high end GPU hardware available to it.

[JigglypuffSexDoll]

OSMesa is from a time before off-screen rendering. It's not something that would suddenly be useful "if only it supported GPUs" or something stupid like that. We have those capabilities today in the APIs. OSMesa also doesn't solve any problem with rendering on a server without a GPU. It uses softpipe/llvmpipe... which you can use from the modern APIs.

[nanonyme]

Consider a Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) environment where an engineer wants to run a bunch of iterative simulations (solver runs) on their HPC cluster or cloud, then have an automated post processor generate reports based on those runs. In the report, they want to render a 3D model of the simulation showing failures or problem areas.

It's a server based "background" task with no direct access to the GPU hardware, so the OpenGL renderer has to use OS Mesa to render the model, then capture a "screenshot" of the rendering to JPEG for including in a web report, PDF report, or whatever.

And before you suggest some of the new APIs that expose the GPU hardware to a non-console process so that they can create an offscreen rendercontext, the HPC cluster or cloud compute instance may not even have high end GPU hardware available to it.

I'm not suggesting anything. I was genuinely curious since my literally only bumping into osmesa was when someone complained they need it to build Wine. I don't really even well know what Wine needs it for.

[jjmcwill2003]

Sorry nanonyme I didn't really mean you directly, but rather the collective "you", or perhaps rather "someone". Rough day at work.

[CochainComplex]

AFAIK octave needs it