[2507] in Release_7.7_team
OpenGL/Mesa on Linux
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Alex T Prengel)
Wed Dec 6 14:36:08 2000
Message-Id: <200012061934.OAA22628@astrophel.mit.edu>
To: release-team@mit.edu
cc: alexp@mit.edu, ajfox@mit.edu, owls@mit.edu
Date: Wed, 06 Dec 2000 14:34:46 -0500
From: Alex T Prengel <alexp@MIT.EDU>
Hi folks- this issue may be a topic for owls discussion-
OpenGL (in its Mesa incarnation) is becoming increasingly important on
Linux as more and more fancy 3d applications become available for Linux
(such as Open Inventor which I just installed yesterday). All of these
rely on having a functional and up-to-date libGL.so and related libraries
(libGLU.so, libglut.so etc.) and corresponding headers.
The libGL.so.1 in the current Linux-Athena release errors out with an
"Illegal instruction" error message on both GX1 and GX110 machines- it
appears to be from the Mesa 3.2 release, according to rpm. I have for
the moment gotten around this by building libraries from the latest
available Mesa 3.4 sources at Source Forge- copies of the installed
libraries for these are in /mit/geomview_v1.8.0/arch/i386_linux22/lib,
with the headers in /mit/geomview_v1.8.0/arch/i386_linux22/include,
and setting LD_LIBRARY_PATH to find these versions.
I have copies of these (or links to them) in 3 different lockers now
and I think we should really be working with a single, up-to-date
copy, preferably in the release.
There are problems with installing this:
1. Mesa is under rapid development and applications are very sensitive
to specific Mesa releases- in general we need to stay as current as possible;
we should at least update on each "first digit point release", (3.4, 3.5, etc.)
which seem to be coming out every couple of months or so.
2. libGL.so can be hardware accelerated and performance increases dramatically
if this is taken advantage of- compiling from source can do this but this
only works for certain graphics cards, and if we have machines with different
cards we may not be able to use the same libGL.so on all machines. Installing
binary rpms may not use hardware acceleration at all or might not even work
if the binary is incompatible with the cpu or graphics card as now appears to
be the case.
3. Getting all the required libraries together can be tricky- for
example, libglut.so is not part of the latest Mesa 3.4 source package, but
it is in the Mesa rpm now on Linux-Athena, Mesa-3.2-2.
So we need a better way of dealing with this.
Alex
