GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap In Software

Written by Michael Larabel in Mesa on 8 September 2011 at 04:53 PM EDT. 2 Comments
MESA
Last week I mentioned that Chrome/Chromium OS developers at Google implemented GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap support for software drivers. This is the GLX extension commonly needed by Compiz and other compositing window managers. This work has been merged into Git, so is there new "desktop bling" chewing up your CPU?

The GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap software support was committed to mainline Mesa Git (for Mesa 7.12-devel) on Tuesday via this commit. However, if you were hoping this would allow Compiz or GNOME Shell with Mutter to work on software drivers like Gallium3D's LLVMpipe, to use software rendering on the CPU, it doesn't work quite yet.

This would mainly just be useful for niche cases where no graphics hardware driver is available, like in instances when using QEMU/KVM currently without any accelerated OpenGL support.

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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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