New EGL Gallium3D State Tracker Pushed

For the past few months there has been a developer, Chia-I Wu, working to bring the Mesa 3D stack to Android netbooks. Chia-I has worked to improve the OpenGL ES support in Mesa, wrote an Android EGL driver, Mesa OpenGL ES/EGL support outside of an X Server, and various other areas of interest. Also being worked on by this developer have been a set of improvements to the EGL support in the Gallium3D stack.

The latest work by Chia-I Wu is a new EGL driver / state tracker (named "egl_g3d") that has just been pushed into Mesa. For those unfamiliar with EGL, as described by the Khronos Group, "EGL is an interface between Khronos rendering APIs such as OpenGL ES or OpenVG and the underlying native platform window system."

This new Gallium3D EGL support can handle mixed client APIs (such as OpenGL, OpenVG, and OpenGL ES), both software and hardware rendering, and EGL_MESA_screen_surface atop bare KMS without X11. As said by Chia-I in his mailing list message, "The goal of this driver is to provide _the_ EGL driver for Gallium architecture."

Going forward the improvements that have been made to the OpenGL ES 2.0 support in Gallium3D will be merged followed by assembling some EGL-Gallium3D documentation, removing unused/broken EGL drivers, and automatic driver selection. Besides the mentioned mailing list thread, the egl_g3d state tracker that adds thousands of new lines of code can be tracked in the Mesa Git log. This work will be found in Mesa 7.8 once released.