Mesa 24.3 Removes Support For The Long-Abandoned OpenMAX API

Some long-rotting code in Mesa has been flushed out today... Mesa 24.3 is now 11.6k lines of code lighter after removing support for the OpenMAX (OMX) API that was implemented as a Gallium3D state tracker long ago and hasn't seen any activity in recent years and the upstream OpenMAX standards work halted more than one decade ago.

While The Khronos Group has been behind many successful open industry standards like OpenGL, OpenCL, Vulkan API, and others, OpenMAX was one of their standards to never really see too much adoption. OpenMAX was a royalty-free cross-platform API for audio / video / image processing particularly for mobile / embedded systems. OpenMAX began two decades ago with backing from companies like Samsung, ARM, STMIcroelectronics, and TI. But it hasn't seen a stable update in more than one decade and application support is very limited. With OpenMAX having not been revised for handling newer video codecs, it's obsolete at this point.

Back in 2014 AMD contributed the OpenMAX state tracker for Mesa's Gallium3D drivers but since then VA-API and VDPAU have seen widespread adoption while OpenMAX faded away. With this merge request, the OpenMAX code is removed from Mesa. The basis given was:

"Remove OMX

The API has been abandoned for some time now and there are no more users. FFmpeg only supports encoding, but it never worked with Mesa. GStreamer completely removed OMX support in 1.24 release."

There was some hesitation in the merge request over potential AMD customer impact for use on Android devices. But even on Android the OpenMAX API is considered legacy. Newer versions of Android use Codec2 that can wrap around the VA-API as the preferred method there with modern Android devices.

So with today's Mesa Git, all the old OpenMAX code has been laid to rest.