Mesa Comes To Android-based x86 Netbooks

If you pay attention to the Mesa3D development mailing list at all you will have noticed quite a number of messages lately from Chia-I Wu, who has been pushing a good number of patches lately. Largely his work has pertained to OpenGL ES support for mobile devices, but his intentions are now known. Chia-I Wu is bringing Mesa (Gallium3D inclusive) to Android. In particular, Chia-I is focusing on running Mesa under Android on Intel-powered netbooks.

The current Android-Mesa stack is capable of accelerating the Android window compositor and allows existing Android applications to utilize full 3D acceleration without any modifications. The work Chia-I has done includes improving the OpenGL ES support, adding in support for new OpenGL extensions, and writing a new EGL driver. This new EGL driver is called egl_android. He has also had to add support for non-X windows systems to Mesa's OpenGL ES/EGL stack, since Android does not use the common X.Org Server but its own system.

Chia-I Wu announced this Android-Mesa work in this mailing list. All of Wu's work currently is not found in the main Mesa repository but rather this Gitorious branch. Previously Chia-I has worked on FFmpeg support in Android and other projects for Google's mobile Linux platform.