Server-Side GLVND Being Hacked On, Could Help PRIME Laptops & More
Adam Jackson of Red Hat has been developing a "server-side GLVND" implementation to allow multiple OpenGL driver stacks to co-exist within the X.Org Server space.
For clients there has been the maturing GLVND -- the OpenGL Vendor Neutral Dispatch library originally developed by NVIDIA -- and Jackson's work is now doing a similar approach from the X.Org Server perspective.
Of the impact, Adam Jackson commented, "the above is enough in a Zaphod Xorg configuration to have heterogeneous GLX providers on different ScreenRecs. It would also make it easy, in a single ScreenRec case, to determine the GLX provider based on the DDX driver in use (e.g., I updated my kernel but not my NVIDIA driver, nouveau wants Xorg's GLX not NVIDIA's). For homogeneous Xinerama-enabled GLX this should not lose any functionality, since the backend can simply be the same for all objects."
Off server-side GLVND, Jackson doesn't think there would be much needed for at least direct contexts in the realm of multi-GPU PRIME laptops. This work could also provide some underlying work towards improvements in the XWayland space.
More details on this new work via xorg-devel. NVIDIA's Aaron Plattner has already replied to this post by saying they have been working on something similar, but didn't reveal any other details yet.
For clients there has been the maturing GLVND -- the OpenGL Vendor Neutral Dispatch library originally developed by NVIDIA -- and Jackson's work is now doing a similar approach from the X.Org Server perspective.
Of the impact, Adam Jackson commented, "the above is enough in a Zaphod Xorg configuration to have heterogeneous GLX providers on different ScreenRecs. It would also make it easy, in a single ScreenRec case, to determine the GLX provider based on the DDX driver in use (e.g., I updated my kernel but not my NVIDIA driver, nouveau wants Xorg's GLX not NVIDIA's). For homogeneous Xinerama-enabled GLX this should not lose any functionality, since the backend can simply be the same for all objects."
Off server-side GLVND, Jackson doesn't think there would be much needed for at least direct contexts in the realm of multi-GPU PRIME laptops. This work could also provide some underlying work towards improvements in the XWayland space.
More details on this new work via xorg-devel. NVIDIA's Aaron Plattner has already replied to this post by saying they have been working on something similar, but didn't reveal any other details yet.
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