Mesa Receives MESA_multithread_makecurrent

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Mesa Receives MESA_multithread_makecurrent

The Mesa code-base now has patches for supporting the new MESA_multithread_makecurrent GLX extension. This extension was originally proposed in 2009 at the Cairo and GStreamer Hackfest but more than a year later it's now only materializing within Mesa and first within Intel's driver...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=OTExOQ

[allquixotic]

Making a new GLX context is pretty slow on most of the mesa-based drivers I've used, even g3d. I think that's what makes Qt4's OpenGL renderer so unbearably slow: there's not really any way to get around the fact that each menu popup and tooltip has to be a window, and each window gets its own context.

Not to say this patch could help Qt4, of course... just that I've seen context creation overhead first-hand. Anything we can do to create fewer contexts is a big win.

[Thunderbird]

I understand the motivation behind the new extension (syncing is tricky in certain applications), but I'm not sure if this GLX extension is really needed though. Plain old glFlush in multithreaded situations can be a pain, but these days we have GL sync objects. If used properly they are easy to use to check whether an operation completed. They encourage you to use the same the same extension if you use OpenCL + OpenGL.

[89c51]

(noob question)

isn't GLX something tied to X11???? will this be beneficial to other stuff also???