New Patches Published For GLVND Mesa Support

There are new Mesa happenings in the OpenGL Vendor Neutral Dispatch Library (GLVND) space.

So far only the binary NVIDIA Linux driver is supporting GLVND for making it easier to maintain OpenGL drivers on Linux systems and allow for multiple drivers to co-exist gracefully. But we know that AMD is looking at GLVND support for their PRO/hybrid driver, I heard mentions this week of Intel support in their consolidated driver effort will handle GLVND, and there have been Mesa patches for GLVND to complete the equation and make Linux OpenGL driver maintenance much easier. The Mesa patches have been condensed and revised for supporting the GLVND interface.

Red Hat's Adam Jackson has posted the condensed patches for supporting the libglvnd interface by Mesa. The work is originally done by a NVIDIA developer, he explained, "This is a squashed commit containing all of [Kyle Brenneman of NVIDIA]'s commits, all but two of [Emil Velikov]'s commits (to follow), and a small fixup from myself to mark the rest of the glX* functions as _GLX_PUBLIC so they are not exported when building for libglvnd. I (ajax) squashed them together both for ease of review, and because most of the changes are un-useful intermediate states representing the evolution of glvnd's internal API."

It would be exciting to see if the GLVND support could get squared away in the next few days to make it into June's release of Mesa, but at the moment not sure how feasible that's looking to make it as a last minute feature.