NVIDIA Posts Patches For Mesa, But Just For Wiring Up An EGL Extension

It's not often we get to talk about NVIDIA developers making open-source contributions to Mesa... After all, their contributions to the Nouveau driver tend to be limited just to the Nouveau DRM/KMS kernel driver and even there seeing patches from the green giant tend to be very infrequent. The latest Mesa patches from NVIDIA aren't even tied to Nouveau but just for wiring up an EGL extension.

Kyle Brenneman of NVIDIA posted a set of patches for wiring up the EGL_KHR_debug extension inside Mesa. This was done since the NVIDIA-backed GLVND library for EGL will require this extension be present by drivers. GLVND is the OpenGL Vendor Neutral Dispatch Library and is the effort led by NVIDIA with the backing of other vendors for cleaning up the OpenGL Linux ABI and make it easier to allow multiple drivers to co-exist on the same system, etc.

To date GLVND has mostly been in the realm of the GLX windowing system API, but EGL support is being worked on. In order to push this GLVND EGL support along and vet it by more drivers than just NVIDIA's proprietary driver, they wired the necessary EGL_KHR_debug extension into Mesa.

The EGL_KHR_debug extension allows EGL to call application functions via a callback when various events/errors occur, which can be helpful in debugging/development purposes. Thus the application/game can be notifed of undefined behavior warnings, incorrect EGL API usage, and related messages.

More details via this patch series.