Off-screen Rendering
+Off-screen Rendering
-Mesa's off-screen rendering interface is used for rendering into -user-allocated blocks of memory. +Mesa's off-screen interface is used for rendering into user-allocated memory +without any sort of window system or operating system dependencies. That is, the GL_FRONT colorbuffer is actually a buffer in main memory, rather than a window on your display. -There are no window system or operating system dependencies. -One potential application is to use Mesa as an off-line, batch-style renderer.
-The OSMesa API provides three basic functions for making off-screen +The OSMesa API provides three basic functions for making off-screen renderings: OSMesaCreateContext(), OSMesaMakeCurrent(), and OSMesaDestroyContext(). See the Mesa/include/GL/osmesa.h header for more information about the API functions.
-There are several examples of OSMesa in the progs/osdemos/
-directory.
+The OSMesa interface may be used with any of three software renderers:
-
+
- llvmpipe - this is the high-performance Gallium LLVM driver +
- softpipe - this it the reference Gallium software driver +
- swrast - this is the legacy Mesa software rasterizer +
Deep color channels
--For some applications 8-bit color channels don't have sufficient -precision. -OSMesa supports 16-bit and 32-bit color channels through the OSMesa interface. -When using 16-bit channels, channels are GLushorts and RGBA pixels occupy -8 bytes. -When using 32-bit channels, channels are GLfloats and RGBA pixels occupy -16 bytes. +There are several examples of OSMesa in the mesa/demos repository.
--Before version 6.5.1, Mesa had to be recompiled to support exactly -one of 8, 16 or 32-bit channels. -With Mesa 6.5.1, Mesa can be compiled for either 8, 16 or 32-bit channels -and render into any of the smaller size channels. -For example, if Mesa's compiled for 32-bit channels, you can also render -16 and 8-bit channel images. -
+Building OSMesa
-To build Mesa/OSMesa for 16 and 8-bit color channel support: +Configure and build Mesa with something like: +
- make realclean - make linux-osmesa16 +configure --enable-osmesa --disable-driglx-direct --disable-dri --with-gallium-drivers=swrast +make
-To build Mesa/OSMesa for 32, 16 and 8-bit color channel support: -
- make realclean - make linux-osmesa32 -+Make sure you have LLVM installed first if you want to use the llvmpipe driver. +
-You'll wind up with a library named libOSMesa16.so or libOSMesa32.so. -Otherwise, most Mesa configurations build an 8-bit/channel libOSMesa.so library -by default. +When the build is complete you should find:
++lib/libOSMesa.so (swrast-based OSMesa) +lib/gallium/libOSMsea.so (gallium-based OSMesa) +
-If performance is important, compile Mesa for the channel size you're -most interested in. +Set your LD_LIBRARY_PATH to point to one directory or the other to select +the library you want to use.
-If you need to compile on a non-Linux platform, copy Mesa/configs/linux-osmesa16 -to a new config file and edit it as needed. Then, add the new config name to -the top-level Makefile. Send a patch to the Mesa developers too, if you're -inclined. +When you link your application, link with -lOSMesa
- - +