Arch Linux Rolls Out Mesa GLVND Support To Testing

Thanks to the work done in part by Fedora, Arch Linux has enabled in testing support for the GLVND-enabled Mesa that can happily co-exist alongside the NVIDIA proprietary driver.

Mesa 17.0 can now be installed side-by-side with the NVIDIA 378.13 binary driver in Arch Linux testing without any LibGL/libglx hacks, thanks to patches from Fedora and the upstream X.org Server patches.

This work is about the GLVND, or OpenGL Vendor Neutral Dispatch library, to allow multiple OpenGL drivers to co-exist on the same system without overwriting each other's libGL file. So far the NVIDIA binary driver and Mesa have GLVND support while still waiting on AMDGPU-PRO to provide said functionality. See our other GLVND articles for more background information on the matter.

More details on GLVND in Arch can be found from today's ArchLinux.org announcement.