Mesa 19.2 Now Exposes The NVIDIA-Led EGL_EXT_platform_device Support

The newest feature arriving in Mesa 19.2 is the long in development EGL platform device code worked on by Emil Velikov.

Mesa's EGL code now exposes EXT_EGL_platform_device support, the EGL extension originally drafted by NVIDIA engineers. As explained in the spec:

Increasingly, EGL and its client APIs are being used in place of "native" rendering APIs to implement the basic graphics functionality of native windowing systems. This creates demand for a method to initialize EGL displays and surfaces directly on top of native GPU or device objects rather than native window system objects. The mechanics of enumerating the underlying native devices and constructing EGL displays and surfaces from them have been solved in various platform and implementation-specific ways. The EGL device family of extensions offers a standardized framework for bootstrapping EGL without the use of any underlying "native" APIs or functionality.

Mesa developers have been primarily interested in this EGL device support for assisting in simplifying some of their testing setups. More details on the background to this work and motives can be found via this PDF slide deck from Emil at last year's XDC2018 conference.