Mesa Makes It Easier Now To Tap More Debugging/Performance Information

Mesa 3D founder Brian Paul has added a relatively simple but useful improvement to core Mesa for dumping more debugging and performance information.

A commit to Mesa today supports the MESA_DEBUG=context environment variable/value. Brian Paul explains it well in the commit message so we'll share that:

A number of drivers report useful debug/perf information accessible through GL_ARB_debug_output and with debug contexts (i.e. setting the GLX_CONTEXT_DEBUG_BIT_ARB flag). But few applications actually use the GL_ARB_debug_output extension.

This change lets one set the MESA_DEBUG env var to "context" to force-set a debug context and report debug/perf messages to stderr (or whatever file MESA_LOG_FILE is set to). This is a useful debugging tool.

So basically setting MESA_DEBUG=context will create an OpenGL debug context that in turn will dump performance/debugging information for different Mesa/Gallium3D drivers, regardless of whether the OpenGL application/game is implementing ARB_debug_output. This change is in Git for Mesa 13.1.