Fedora 25 Using GLVND For Mesa Has Been Causing Headaches

The decision to switch Mesa to enabling GLVND support in Fedora 25 as a post-release change has been causing headaches for some users.

As mentioned last month, the plan was to begin shipping a GLVND-enabled Mesa build. GLVND , of course, being short for the OpenGL Vendor Neutral Dispatch Library. GLVND was spearheaded by NVIDIA and is effectively a new Linux OpenGL ABI. GLVND allows supported drivers to happily co-exist on the same system rather than clashing over the libGL and is a long-overdue change. Mesa has supported GLVND for a while along with the NVIDIA proprietary driver while we just haven't seen support yet from AMDGPU-PRO.

It turns out that shipping a GLVND-enabled Mesa as a post-release update to Fedora 25 may have not been a wise idea. In particular, it appears to cause problems for a subset of users making use of the Sway window manager. There are also reports of the update breaking Steam games on Intel graphics and some other problems. See Bodhi for more comments.

Fedora's FESCo committee has now weighed in. FESCo is saying that the OpenGL update must remain in updates-testing until the next meeting and weigh the benefits of landing GLVND-enabled Mesa into this current Fedora release rather than postponing it to Fedora 26.