Using OpenGL Without An X Server With NVIDIA

Recent releases of NVIDIA's proprietary Linux driver support creating OpenGL contexts outside of the X Server.

Besides working towards Wayland/Mir support, with NVIDIA Linux engineers decoupling the OpenGL support from the X Server has also allowed supporting OpenGL without any display server active. This use-case is particularly useful for GPU-accelerated server render farms and the like where they may have no interest in having a display server running.

With the NVIDIA 355/358 driver series is support for full OpenGL contexts using EGL without an X Server running, including for multi-GPU rendering. While this is primarily aimed at NVIDIA HPC Linux customers, if you are interested in learning more about the procedures, see this recent NVIDIA developer blog post entitled "EGL Eye: OpenGL Visualization without an X Server."