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11 <h1>The Mesa
3D Graphics Library
</h1>
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17 <h1>Compilation and Installation using Meson
</h1>
19 <h2 id=
"basic">1. Basic Usage
</h2>
21 <p><strong>The Meson build system is generally considered stable and ready
22 for production
</strong></p>
24 <p>The meson build is tested on on Linux, macOS, Cygwin and Haiku, it should
25 work on FreeBSD, DragonflyBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD.
</p>
27 <p><strong>Mesa requires Meson
>=
0.44.1 to build.
</strong>
29 Some older versions of meson do not check that they are too old and will error
34 The meson program is used to configure the source directory and generates
35 either a ninja build file or Visual Studio® build files. The latter must
36 be enabled via the
<code>--backend
</code> switch, as ninja is the default backend on all
37 operating systems. Meson only supports out-of-tree builds, and must be passed a
38 directory to put built and generated sources into. We'll call that directory
47 To see a description of your options you can run
<code>meson configure
</code>
48 along with a build directory to view the selected options for. This will show
49 your meson global arguments and project arguments, along with their defaults
50 and your local settings.
52 Meson does not currently support listing options before configure a build
53 directory, but this feature is being discussed upstream.
57 meson configure build/
61 With additional arguments
<code>meson configure
</code> is used to change
62 options on already configured build directory. All options passed to this
63 command are in the form
<code>-D
"command"=
"value"</code>.
67 meson configure build/ -Dprefix=/tmp/install -Dglx=true
71 Note that options taking lists (such as
<code>platforms
</code>) are
72 <a href=
"http://mesonbuild.com/Build-options.html#using-build-options">a bit
73 more complicated
</a>, but the simplest form compatible with Mesa options
74 is to use a comma to separate values (
<code>-D platforms=drm,wayland
</code>)
75 and brackets to represent an empty list (
<code>-D platforms=[]
</code>).
79 Once you've run the initial
<code>meson
</code> command successfully you can use
80 your configured backend to build the project. With ninja, the -C option can be
81 be used to point at a directory to build.
89 Without arguments, it will produce libGL.so and/or several other libraries
90 depending on the options you have chosen. Later, if you want to rebuild for a
91 different configuration, you should run
<code>ninja clean
</code> before
92 changing the configuration, or create a new out of tree build directory for
93 each configuration you want to build
94 <a href=
"http://mesonbuild.com/Using-multiple-build-directories.html">as
95 recommended in the documentation
</a>
99 <dt><code>Environment Variables
</code></dt>
100 <dd><p>Meson supports the standard CC and CXX environment variables for
101 changing the default compiler, and CFLAGS, CXXFLAGS, and LDFLAGS for setting
102 options to the compiler and linker.
104 The default compilers depends on your operating system. Meson supports most of
105 the popular compilers, a complete list is available
106 <a href=
"http://mesonbuild.com/Reference-tables.html#compiler-ids">here
</a>.
108 These arguments are consumed and stored by meson when it is initialized or
109 re-initialized. Therefore passing them to meson configure will not do anything,
110 and passing them to ninja will only do something if ninja decides to
111 re-initialize meson, for example, if a meson.build file has been changed.
112 Changing these variables will not cause all targets to be rebuilt, so running
113 ninja clean is recommended when changing CFLAGS or CXXFLAGS. Meson will never
114 change compiler in a configured build directory.
118 CC=clang CXX=clang++ meson build-clang
120 ninja -C build-clang clean
122 CFLAGS=-Wno-typedef-redefinition ninja -C build-clang
125 <p>Meson also honors
<code>DESTDIR
</code> for installs
</p>
129 <dt><code>LLVM
</code></dt>
130 <dd><p>Meson includes upstream logic to wrap llvm-config using it's standard
131 dependency interface. It will search
<code>$PATH
</code> (or
<code>%PATH%
</code> on windows) for
132 llvm-config, so using an LLVM from a non-standard path is as easy as
133 <code>PATH=/path/with/llvm-config:$PATH meson build
</code>.
138 <dt><code>PKG_CONFIG_PATH
</code></dt>
140 <code>pkg-config
</code> utility is a hard requirement for configuring and
141 building Mesa on Unix-like systems. It is used to search for external libraries
142 on the system. This environment variable is used to control the search path for
143 <code>pkg-config
</code>. For instance, setting
144 <code>PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/X11R6/lib/pkgconfig
</code> will search for package
145 metadata in
<code>/usr/X11R6
</code> before the standard directories.
</p>
150 One of the oddities of meson is that some options are different when passed to
151 the
<code>meson
</code> than to
<code>meson configure
</code>. These options are
152 passed as --option=foo to
<code>meson
</code>, but -Doption=foo to
<code>meson
153 configure
</code>. Mesa defined options are always passed as -Doption=foo.
156 <p>For those coming from autotools be aware of the following:
</p>
159 <dt><code>--buildtype/-Dbuildtype
</code></dt>
160 <dd><p>This option will set the compiler debug/optimisation levels to aid
161 debugging the Mesa libraries.
</p>
163 <p>Note that in meson this defaults to
<code>debugoptimized
</code>, and
164 not setting it to
<code>release
</code> will yield non-optimal
165 performance and binary size. Not using
<code>debug
</code> may interfere
166 with debugging as some code and validation will be optimized away.
169 <p> For those wishing to pass their own optimization flags, use the
<code>plain
</code>
170 buildtype, which causes meson to inject no additional compiler arguments, only
171 those in the C/CXXFLAGS and those that mesa itself defines.
</p>
176 <dt><code>-Db_ndebug
</code></dt>
177 <dd><p>This option controls assertions in meson projects. When set to
<code>false
</code>
178 (the default) assertions are enabled, when set to true they are disabled. This
179 is unrelated to the
<code>buildtype
</code>; setting the latter to
180 <code>release
</code> will not turn off assertions.