Phoronix: Talking About EGL In Mesa On Linux
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Talking About EGL In Mesa On Linux
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Originally posted by Nils View PostIt's really nice to have EGL in MESA. But does anyone know a tutorial or something on EGL? Or is the specification the only documentation out there? Thanks in advance.
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As a non-native english speaker I still have problems with basic grammer and making my own sentences. However I have zero problems listening and reading english whatsoever.
I have yet to meat someone IRL that has more problems listening and reading english as opposed to writing and speaking the language
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Originally posted by Nils View PostIt's really nice to have EGL in MESA. But does anyone know a tutorial or something on EGL? Or is the specification the only documentation out there? Thanks in advance.
EGL (Embedded-System Graphics Library) "is an interface between Khronos rendering APIs such as OpenGL ES or OpenVG and the underlying native platform window system. It handles graphics context management, surface/buffer binding, and rendering synchronization and enables high-performance, accelerated, mixed-mode 2D and 3D rendering using other Khronos APIs."[1] EGL is managed by the non-profit technology consortium Khronos Group.
Basically; you cannot use straight OpenGL for a windowing system because OpenGL lacks much of the APIs necessary to control the display, mode setting, multi application rendering buffers, and such things. It's designed for writing 3D applications and not windowing systems.
This is why the original attempts at created 3D desktops using things like XGL X window manager couldn't work.
Well... EGL is the part that was created to fill in the gap and make windowing systems using standardized APIs possible.
As long as you have a driver for your video card that supports EGL then you can run Wayland... and now Mesa has support for EGL.
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Now all we need, besides improving Wayland and driver support in general, is a X.org DDX that targets Wayland.
Why do we need a Xorg DDX for Wayland (you may ask), well because.....
Xorg is made up of two parts: Device Independent X (DIX) and Device Dependent X (DDX). DIX is the part that applications use such as Xlib and the X networking protocol.
DDX is the part that interacts with your hardware. With Linux the 'DDX' is called 'xfree'. It uses various modules to provide direct hardware support for hardware. Like the Intel X driver or the 'NV' nvidia driver. Well Xorg provides X support for Windows (xwin ddx) and OS X (darwin ddx). This is why you can display X Windows applications on OS X.
Well, with a Wayland DDX then distributions can start switching over to using Wayland instead of Xfree and still keep compatibility with all your applications.
No need to sacrifice X networking, no need to write new Xfree drivers for each new piece of hardware. Just run X on top of Wayland and that is all you'll ever need. As long as Wayland has EGL support in the hardware and such then that's it... no more X hardware issues.
Then things like Gallium start to make more and more sense.
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Is anyone aware of any WM that has plans at targeting EGL? It seems as though this would be the obvious thing for all WM to do. Perhaps I am missing something. Is the issue support? I don't see why this would need support from the card (assuming the card supports at least OGL).
Perplexing...
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