The Mesa 3D Graphics Library

Compilation and Installation using Autoconf

  1. Basic Usage

  2. Driver Options

  3. Demo Program Options

1. Basic Usage

The autoconf generated configure script can be used to guess your platform and change various options for building Mesa. To use the configure script, type:

    ./configure

To see a short description of all the options, type ./configure --help. If you are using a development snapshot and the configure script does not exist, type ./autogen.sh to generate it first. If you know the options you want to pass to configure, you can pass them to autogen.sh. It will run configure with these options after it is generated. Once you have run configure and set the options to your preference, type:

    make

This will produce libGL.so and several other libraries depending on the options you have chosen. Later, if you want to rebuild for a different configuration run make realclean before rebuilding.

Some of the generic autoconf options are used with Mesa:

There are also a few general options for altering the Mesa build:

2. Driver Options

There are several different driver modes that Mesa can use. These are described in more detail in the basic installation instructions. The Mesa driver is controlled through the configure option --with-driver. There are currently three supported options in the configure script.

Xlib

This is the default mode for building Mesa. It uses Xlib as a software renderer to do all rendering. It corresponds to the option --with-driver=xlib. The libX11 and libXext libraries, as well as the X11 development headers, will be need to support the Xlib driver.

DRI

This mode uses the DRI hardware drivers for accelerated OpenGL rendering. Enable the DRI drivers with the option --with-driver=dri. See the basic installation instructions for details on prerequisites for the DRI drivers.

--with-dri-driverdir=DIR

This option specifies the location the DRI drivers will be installed to and the location libGL will search for DRI drivers. The default is ${libdir}/dri.

--with-dri-drivers=DRIVER,DRIVER,...

This option allows a specific set of DRI drivers to be built. For example, --with-dri-drivers="swrast,i965,radeon,nouveau". By default, the drivers will be chosen depending on the target platform. See the directory src/mesa/drivers/dri in the source tree for available drivers. Beware that the swrast DRI driver is used by both libGL and the X.Org xserver GLX module to do software rendering, so you may run into problems if it is not available.

--disable-driglx-direct

Disable direct rendering in GLX. Normally, direct hardware rendering through the DRI drivers and indirect software rendering are enabled in GLX. This option disables direct rendering entirely. It can be useful on architectures where kernel DRM modules are not available.

--enable-glx-tls

Enable Thread Local Storage (TLS) in GLX.

--with-expat=DIR
The DRI-enabled libGL uses expat to parse the DRI configuration files in /etc/drirc and ~/.drirc. This option allows a specific expat installation to be used. For example, --with-expat=/usr/local will search for expat headers and libraries in /usr/local/include and /usr/local/lib, respectively.

OSMesa

No libGL is built in this mode. Instead, the driver code is built into the Off-Screen Mesa (OSMesa) library. See the Off-Screen Rendering page for more details.

--with-osmesa-bits=BITS

This option allows the size of the color channel in bits to be specified. By default, an 8-bit channel will be used, and the driver will be named libOSMesa. Other options are 16- and 32-bit color channels, which will add the bit size to the library name. For example, --with-osmesa-bits=16 will create the libOSMesa16 library with a 16-bit color channel.

3. Library Options

The configure script provides more fine grained control over the GL libraries that will be built. More details on the specific GL libraries can be found in the basic installation instructions.

4. Demo Program Options

There are many demonstration programs in the MesaDemos tarball. If the programs are available when ./configure is run, a subset of the programs will be built depending on the driver and library options chosen. See the directory progs for the full set of demos.

--with-demos=DEMOS,DEMOS,...

This option allows a specific set of demo programs to be built. For example, --with-demos="xdemos,slang". Beware that if this option is used, it will not be ensured that the necessary GL libraries will be available.

--without-demos

This completely disables building the demo programs. It is equivalent to --with-demos=no.