Originally posted by bridgman
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We need a FAQ for EGL/GLES on the Open Source Graphics Stack!
Here'd be my questions:
Q: Can Mesa build both desktop OpenGL and GL ES at the same time?
A: Yes, but it's not the default (you have to pass a ./configure option).
Q: Does the Xorg server support EGL?
A: I don't know.
Q: As far as Mesa's implementation of GLES, does GLES only support EGL for the platform graphics interface (and not GLX)?
A: I don't know.
Q: Does Xorg support EGL being used simultaneously with GLX in different applications on the same X server?
A: I don't know.
Q: Does Xorg support GLES being used simultaneously with GL in different applications on the same X server?
A: Yes, I think so. Firefox WebGL uses OpenGL ES 2.0, and a compositing manager uses OpenGL 2.0. They work together. QED. This could also answer the question about EGL and GLX being used together, if EGL is the only supported interface for GLES and is in fact being used by WebGL.
Q: Same "Does Xorg..." questions but for Wayland.
A: I don't know.
Q: Can you run hardware-accelerated GLX + OpenGL applications in a child X server on Wayland?
A: I don't know.
Q: How do I know if an application uses GLES or GL?
A: Assuming it doesn't dynamically load the libraries at runtime, you can check with ldd. If it links against libGLESv2.so (or v1), it uses GLES. If it links against libGL.so, it uses desktop OpenGL. You can also tell at compile-time by which headers it includes from /usr/include.
I think we need a long term support path for hardware-accelerated desktop OpenGL + GLX for both X.Org and Wayland. Mainly because there are a lot of applications out there that use it, and some of them are closed source and unmaintained, or the maintainers will refuse to change to EGL + GLES. Or maybe they're open source but developers simply lack the time to convert them to EGL + GLES.
That said, it's entirely possible that EGL + GLES will turn out to be a better solution for free software going into the future, both because the EGL protocol is better-designed (GLX is very very old) and because GLES 2.0 appears not to contain any patented features. Where we can use EGL + GLES, we should do so -- but not at the expense of removing support for GLX or desktop GL.
Right now I believe that we can use EGL+GLES and GLX+GL in tandem on the same X server, so we're looking good. Hopefully I'm not wrong. And hopefully that doesn't change in the future.
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