NVIDIA Reportedly Working On A Unified EGL Driver

[zanny]

Nvidia has had GLES & EGL support for a couple of years now it's in the Tegra driver, nothing new there. Linux, Wayland, Mir, ... had nothing to do with this. AMD/Ati doesn't have GLES/EGL support what they have is an emulator. I predict, in the future GL and GLES will be one in the same call it OpenGL 5 maybe?

We really need to dump legacy support at this point it's only holding us back.

Regardless once GLES/EGL support on the desktop for all common chipsets is here, Display Servers will be developed like Window Managers "Everyone is going to have there own flavor" things
like Wayland and Mir are not going to be all that important.

We will also see an explosion of Application/GUI development toolkits. You think things are fragmented now just wait. GLES, EGL and OpenVG make these things trivial to develop.

If you read up the politics behind the conception of glES, one of the driving reasons for its creation and adoption was that openGL 1 - 2 built up a lot of completely useless in modern usage API calls, such that glES only uses vertex arrays, for example. The reason openGL still exists and is extended at all is for backwards compatibility reasons, and a few niche cutting edge features not in glES 3. Most anything you want to implement can be done in the shader language anyway.

A lot of CAD programs depend on non-vertex GL commands from the early days of ogl, so they are one of the greatest interest groups keeping it supported. I think the Linux desktop is at an interesting point in its development where it could in theory depreciate the original ogl entirely and focus on ES, since it has few / no legacy apps that require the old API calls, and anyone that needs those could still in theory run an XWayland server (in context) and expect full openGL to be present.

Targeting gles means you can hit every mobile and desktop platform, plus webgl (which is implemented as a dialect of gles 2, and only requires command translation rather than total engine refactoring due to different API syntax) in one swoop.

[zester]

Nvidia has had GLES & EGL support for a couple of years now it's in the Tegra driver, nothing new there. Linux, Wayland, Mir, ... had nothing to do with this. AMD/Ati doesn't have GLES/EGL support what they have is an emulator. I predict, in the future GL and GLES will be one in the same call it OpenGL 5 maybe?

We really need to dump legacy support at this point it's only holding us back.

Regardless once GLES/EGL support on the desktop for all common chipsets is here, Display Servers will be developed like Window Managers "Everyone is going to have there own flavor" things
like Wayland and Mir are not going to be all that important.

We will also see an explosion of Application/GUI development toolkits. You think things are fragmented now just wait. GLES, EGL and OpenVG make these things trivial to develop.

[MistaED]

Yes it does, according to the spec. See page 36. I'm happy about that, I like the new in/out syntax better. It doesn't affect speed, since it compiles to the same code, but it's nice that it will be compatible with OpenGL 3.3+ syntax.

Oh awesome I didn't know, thanks for the link. Now I'm trying to remember where I read that they weren't in it, I think it was page 2 that tricked me under "Changes from OpenGL GLSL 3.3: Removed: in and out blocks."

[foobaz]

OpenGL ES 3.0 [...] GLSL syntax doesn't use in/out

Yes it does, according to the spec. See page 36. I'm happy about that, I like the new in/out syntax better. It doesn't affect speed, since it compiles to the same code, but it's nice that it will be compatible with OpenGL 3.3+ syntax.

[MistaED]

I think as long as they can be backwards-compatible with the xservers then this change would be relatively trivial for them, it's probably the regression testing which will be the hard part. They already support EGL on Tegra so just use that I guess. Also will GLX still work via xwayland or xmir? Surely this wouldn't be too hard, I'd really like Maya/Nuke/Mudbox/etc. to still work on my workstation with these new display managers, but not using a software fallback or indirection driver like XGL did.

OpenGL ES 3.0 is more like OpenGL 3.0 but with a few things cut like the GLSL syntax doesn't use in/out and there's no geometry shaders. I think adding OpenGL support to EGL would be trivial, you'd just specify the right enum in context-creation of your app, no big deal? The window manager might be better off using a subset of what ES supplies just for compatibility but the apps themselves shouldn't have a problem...

[erikfork]

Yeah seriously, I have no idea what these Zealots are screaming about. Ubuntu brought Nvidia to EGL (Mir & Wayland) single handedly. They are acticly working with Nvidia to go this. NO ONE in wayland seems to have even got Nvidia to entertain the idea. Seems like a success story to me.

Nvidia said they were working on EGL support at XDC2012 in Spetember, six months ago, so I would think Wayland is more likely than Mir to have been a factor in that decision.

[ninez]

Yeah seriously, I have no idea what these Zealots are screaming about. Ubuntu brought Nvidia to EGL (Mir & Wayland) single handedly. They are acticly working with Nvidia to go this. NO ONE in wayland seems to have even got Nvidia to entertain the idea. Seems like a success story to me.

No. I highly doubt Canonical 'single-handily' did anything. :\

EGL is becoming very popular and this is a natural progression of standards, that nvidia will need to support, regardless. + (as others have told you) their hasn't actually been any clarification directly from Nvidia on their motivations or anything like that...

I'd also like some citations on this idea that 'NO ONE' from the Wayland camp has contacted nVidia - so please provide citations, thanks. (I didn't realize that you were privy to every email that is received by nVidia ~ which is what you are claiming, essentially).

..and to clarify, i am in the same camp as people annoyed with the Mir news and canonical, in general. (i've never really liked canonical to begin with).

[MartinN]

For all those who don't understand, I don't want to be *forced* to use binary drivers because vendors will be happy to close up their driver code again, putting me into a black box. I *DON'T* want to live in a Windows world of no control over what runs on my systems!

You won't be forced. You can use open-source drivers in addition to closed-source binary drivers. You absolutely have control over your system - you can uninstall the binary drivers if you do not want them.

Mir will undermine *ALL THE WORK* that's been done to get vendors to open source their drivers and allow for both Linux and *BSD communities the ability to use open source drivers.

The only thing Mir undermines is collaboration between two sets of devs working on the same (or if you'd believe Canonical, not-quite-the-same) display server. In my view, it duplicates effort needlessly and Canonical has yet to come up with a single valid technical reason as to why Wayland could not be made to support their paradigm of thinking. The cherry on top is that Mark Shuttleworth reneged on Wayland after committing to it publicly.

Any GPU vendor can still choose to open-source their drivers, regardless of what happens with Mir. Wayland already runs on open-source GPU drivers.

Lastly, please stop trolling.

[erendorn]

Yeah seriously, I have no idea what these Zealots are screaming about. Ubuntu brought Nvidia to EGL (Mir & Wayland) single handedly. They are acticly working with Nvidia to go this. NO ONE in wayland seems to have even got Nvidia to entertain the idea. Seems like a success story to me.

1) There is exactly as much official commitment from Nvidia to Mir and Wayland (hint: 0)
2) There is approximately as much expected commitment from Nvidia to Mir and Wayland ("maybe" and "someone says so")
3) Both need EGL + extensions. Sadly, not the same extensions.

[md1032]

Great that Nvidia is developing a EGL driver, then we can use proprietary Nvidia driver on Wayland which use OpenGL ES.

However, to get full OpenGL support, and not just OpenGL ES support, we need to split out X support from libgl.

libgl is needed for full OpenGL support, but unfortunately it is tied to X.

There's a proposal for exactly that: https://github.com/aritger/linux-opengl-abi-proposal