KDE Ponders Defaulting To EGL Rather Than GLX

Written by Michael Larabel in KDE on 11 August 2015 at 09:46 AM EDT. 9 Comments
KDE
KDE KWin maintainer Martin Gräßlin is exploring the possibility of defaulting to using EGL rather than GLX when running the KDE desktop on the X.Org Server.

EGL is needed by Wayland support, KWin has supported GL/GLES on EGL for some time, and the drivers are into shape for supporting OpenGL over EGL. The most recent piece of the puzzle is the new NVIDIA proprietary driver providing full OpenGL via EGL. I'm not sure what the current EGL state is for the AMD Catalyst Linux driver, but now the NVIDIA blob is in sufficient shape and the Mesa/Gallium3D drivers have good EGL support that Martin is hoping to make this the default windowing system API to use.

He raised the question of whether EGL should be the default via this new blog post.

Open-source developers for a while now have been looking for EGL to unseat GLX in the X world. Back in 2012, Intel was even calling it pretty much deprecated. As part of the long-talked about but not materializing new OpenGL Linux ABI, EGL would be the preferred choice. Aside from Wayland depending upon EGL, so does Canonical's Mir, and too by other mobile/embedded platforms.
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