docs/meson.html

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  10 <div class="header">
  11   <h1>The Mesa 3D Graphics Library</h1>
  12 </div>
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  16
  17 <h1>Compilation and Installation using Meson</h1>
  18
  19 <h2 id="basic">1. Basic Usage</h2>
  20
  21 <p><strong>The Meson build system is generally considered stable and ready
  22 for production</strong></p>
  23
  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>
  26
  27 <p><strong>Mesa requires Meson >= 0.42.0 to build in general.</strong>
  28
  29 Additionaly, to build the Clover OpenCL state tracker or the OpenSWR driver
  30 meson 0.44.0 or greater is required.
  31
  32 Some older versions of meson do not check that they are too old and will error
  33 out in odd ways.
  34 </p>
  35
  36 <p>
  37 The meson program is used to configure the source directory and generates
  38 either a ninja build file or Visual Studio® build files. The latter must
  39 be enabled via the --backend switch, as ninja is the default backend on all
  40 operating systems. Meson only supports out-of-tree builds, and must be passed a
  41 directory to put built and generated sources into. We'll call that directory
  42 "build" for examples.
  43 </p>
  44
  45 <pre>
  46     meson build/
  47 </pre>
  48
  49 <p>
  50 To see a description of your options you can run <code>meson configure</code>
  51 along with a build directory to view the selected options for. This will show
  52 your meson global arguments and project arguments, along with their defaults
  53 and your local settings.
  54
  55 Moes does not currently support listing options before configure a build
  56 directory, but this feature is being discussed upstream.
  57 </p>
  58
  59 <pre>
  60     meson configure build/
  61 </pre>
  62
  63 <p>
  64 With additional arguments <code>meson configure</code> is used to change
  65 options on already configured build directory. All options passed to this
  66 command are in the form -D "command"="value".
  67 </p>
  68
  69 <pre>
  70     meson configure build/ -Dprefix=/tmp/install -Dglx=true
  71 </pre>
  72
  73 <p>
  74 Once you've run the initial <code>meson</code> command successfully you can use
  75 your configured backend to build the project. With ninja, the -C option can be
  76 be used to point at a directory to build.
  77 </p>
  78
  79 <pre>
  80     ninja -C build/
  81 </pre>
  82
  83 <p>
  84 Without arguments, it will produce libGL.so and/or several other libraries
  85 depending on the options you have chosen. Later, if you want to rebuild for a
  86 different configuration, you should run <code>ninja clean</code> before
  87 changing the configuration, or create a new out of tree build directory for
  88 each configuration you want to build.
  89
  90 http://mesonbuild.com/Using-multiple-build-directories.html
  91 </p>
  92
  93 <dt><code>Environment Variables</code></dt>
  94 <dd><p>Meson supports the standard CC and CXX envrionment variables for
  95 changing the default compiler, and CFLAGS, CXXFLAGS, and LDFLAGS for setting
  96 options to the compiler and linker.
  97
  98 The default compilers depends on your operating system. Meson supports most of
  99 the popular compilers, a complete list is available
 100 <a href="http://mesonbuild.com/Reference-tables.html#compiler-ids">here</a>.
 101
 102 These arguments are consumed and stored by meson when it is initialized or
 103 re-initialized. Therefore passing them to meson configure will not do anything,
 104 and passing them to ninja will only do something if ninja decides to
 105 re-initialze meson, for example, if a meson.build file has been changed.
 106 Changing these variables will not cause all targets to be rebuilt, so running
 107 ninja clean is recomended when changing CFLAGS or CXXFLAGS. meson will never
 108 change compiler in a configured build directory.
 109 </p>
 110
 111 <pre>
 112     CC=clang CXX=clang++ meson build-clang
 113     ninja -C build-clang
 114     ninja -C build-clang clean
 115     touch meson.build
 116     CFLAGS=-Wno-typedef-redefinition ninja -C build-clang
 117 </pre>
 118
 119 <p>Meson also honors DESTDIR for installs</p>
 120 </dd>
 121
 122
 123 <dl>
 124 <dt><code>LLVM</code></dt>
 125 <dd><p>Meson includes upstream logic to wrap llvm-config using it's standard
 126 dependncy interface. It will search $PATH (or %PATH% on windows) for
 127 llvm-config, so using an LLVM from a non-standard path is as easy as
 128 <code>PATH=/path/with/llvm-config:$PATH meson build</code>.
 129 </p></dd>
 130 </dl>
 131
 132 <dl>
 133 <dt><code>PKG_CONFIG_PATH</code></dt>
 134 <dd><p>The
 135 <code>pkg-config</code> utility is a hard requirement for configuring and
 136 building Mesa on Unix-like systems. It is used to search for external libraries
 137 on the system. This environment variable is used to control the search path for
 138 <code>pkg-config</code>. For instance, setting
 139 <code>PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/X11R6/lib/pkgconfig</code> will search for package
 140 metadata in <code>/usr/X11R6</code> before the standard directories.</p>
 141 </dd>
 142 </dl>
 143
 144 <p>
 145 One of the oddities of meson is that some options are different when passed to
 146 the <code>meson</code> than to <code>meson configure</code>. These options are
 147 passed as --option=foo to <code>meson</code>, but -Doption=foo to <code>meson
 148 configure</code>. Mesa defined options are always passed as -Doption=foo.
 149 <p>
 150
 151 <p>For those coming from autotools be aware of the following:</p>
 152
 153 <dl>
 154 <dt><code>--buildtype/-Dbuildtype</code></dt>
 155 <dd><p>This option will set the compiler debug/optimisation levels to aid
 156 debugging the Mesa libraries.</p>
 157
 158 <p>Note that in meson this defaults to "debugoptimized", and  not setting it to
 159 "release" will yield non-optimal performance and binary size. Not using "debug"
 160 may interfer with debbugging as some code and validation will be optimized
 161 away.
 162 </p>
 163
 164 <p> For those wishing to pass their own optimization flags, use the "plain"
 165 buildtype, which causes meson to inject no additional compiler arguments, only
 166 those in the C/CXXFLAGS and those that mesa itself defines.</p>
 167 </dd>
 168 </dl>
 169
 170 <dl>
 171 <dt><code>-Db_ndebug</code></dt>
 172 <dd><p>This option controls assertions in meson projects. When set to false
 173 (the default) assertions are enabled, when set to true they are disabled. This
 174 is unrelated to the <code>buildtype</code>; setting the latter to
 175 <code>release</code> will not turn off assertions.
 176 </p>
 177 </dd>
 178 </dl>