Mesa Eyes Pulling libdrm Into Its Codebase

Longtime AMD Mesa driver developer Marek Olšák has laid out a proposal to integrate the libdrm code within Mesa rather than being maintained as its own separate project.

The libdrm code is the library for accessing the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel drivers. Libdrm sits in effect between Mesa and the kernel drivers. There is common code within libdrm as well as hardware/driver-specific code. Libdrm is most notably used by Windows but there's also other users of libdrm too for those needing to interface directly with Linux's DRM.

Marek laid out a draft merge request that would merge libdrm into Mesa. This would simplify development and also make it easier for building Mesa. Mesa's different drivers do maintain varying version requirements around libdrm and if it was all developed in-tree would be easier on the developers and those frequently building Mesa.

Marek says he intends for this move to still maintain backwards compatibility of libdrm. This merge request was opened a few days ago with still needing to update the continuous integration (CI) test scripts, new GitLab labels, etc, before potentially landing this change.

Those interested in seeing libdrm embedded into the Mesa codebase can find the draft merge request via the Mesa GitLab.