AMD Is Planning To Support GLVND For Easier Linux Driver Setup & Maintenance

The other follow-up question I received an answer to on Friday from AMD's media liaison was whether the company is looking at supporting the OpenGL Vendor Neutral Dispatch Library (GLVND) to make it easier to install and maintain their user-space GL driver on Linux systems.

GLVND has been in development for a few years by NVIDIA as part of a new Linux OpenGL ABI. NVIDIA's 361 beta driver released earlier this month finally shipped with GLVND support while NVIDIA developers this GL Vendor Neutral Dispatch Library as an open-source project.

As explained in that earlier article, "Using libglvnd will ultimately simplify the Linux OpenGL driver installation and make it easier for multiple different OpenGL drivers to co-exist on the same system. With this new format, the different proprietary drivers won't overwrite each other nor cause havoc to the stock Mesa libraries. That is as long as the other prominent Linux OpenGL drivers also opt for the GLVND design."

I followed up with AMD to see whether they intend to support GLVND to make it easier for installing/uninstalling and maintaining their drivers. Here's their response:

We are interested in implementing support for LIBGLVND now that it has met a reasonable level of completeness and stability. We are in the process of evaluating when we can add support to our roadmap.

Yes! So in the future, it will be easier and more sane for dealing with Linux OpenGL video driver installations and not fearing your system is in a borked state upon removing one of these drivers that would otherwise have overwritten the libGL.so.