Intel Looks To Bring Mesa SNB libEGL To Android

It seems that Intel has a new interest in bringing Sandy Bridge graphics support to Google's Android operating system. Chad Versace, part of Intel's OSTC team normally working on the desktop Linux graphics stack, is looking to bring the Intel i965 (particularly, the Sandy Bridge support) of Mesa with libEGL over to Android Gingerbread for x86 devices.

Chad Versace, one of Intel's newer Linux developers, wrote to the android-x86 mailing list. "I am porting Mesa's libEGL to Android, targeting Gingerbread on Sandy Bridge. I am new to Android development, and so have several questions. Any information and assistance the android-x68 community can give me will be thankfully received."

In his initial email, he raises questions about porting Mesa / libEGL to Android and asks whether the current gingerbread-x86 code-base is even capable of being built and booting. Chad also asks about documentation concerning some of Android's EGL extensions (namely EGL_ANDROID_swap_rectangle, EGL_ANDROID_get_render_buffer, and EGL_ANDROID_image_native_buffer).

Of course, if you're a long-time Phoronix reader, you will know that even back in 2009 there was work to bring Mesa to Android x86. Chia-I Wu was the original developer bringing Mesa to Android and also improving Mesa's OpenGL ES support. He was the one also largely responsible for the EGL Gallium3D state tracker.

Building Mesa from mainline source on Android isn't yet suitable, but there is currently a separate repository that Mesa must be pulled from at this time (it's hosted at android-x86.org). There's also a separate repository for the needed kernel DRM support.

The current Mesa Android repository is based upon Mesa 7.10-devel, but there is already work under-way on bringing it up to Mesa 7.11. It's also already been tested and working on a Sandy Bridge notebook with Android. It seems Intel itself is a bit late to the game.