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Re: Minimum Mesa (libGL) Build

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In comp.windows.x Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:
> On 24 Oct 2025 08:30:55 +1000, Computer Nerd Kev wrote:
>> Mesa now depends on libLLVM which is huge, but I don't use 3D graphics
>> except on one system ...
> 
> Lots of onscreen rendering is done through 3D libraries now anyway. This 
> is because people realized a couple of decades or so ago (thanks to Apple) 
> that having separate 2D and 3D acceleration in your graphics hardware was 
> unnecessary duplication of functionality.

Yes I know OpenGL can be used for 2D rendering, but like I already
said, I know it's not here because these programs display on an X
server without GLX support. As it happens I tried four of my
most-used programs depending on Mesa libs (libGL, libEGL, libGLES,
etc.) with Mesa's libraries removed and they run fine. The deps on
Mesa are from silly things like librsvg required by GTK2 and libva2
required by FFmpeg (I'm not using GPU video encoding/decoding) so I
might even manage fine without Mesa at all.

It turns out Mesa won't build without any drivers enabled, so
that's not how you make "stand-alone Mesa". But the next best thing
is to only enable the "softpipe" software renderer driver which
doesn't require LLVM. That's working in Firefox (which works
without Mesa too, but detects when it's available), and cuts out
all the big dependencies including libLLVM.

build options used:
-Dvalgrind=disabled -Dlibunwind=disabled -Dglx-direct=false \
-Dgles2=enabled -Dplatforms=x11 -Dallow-fallback-for=libdrm \
-Dvideo-codecs= -Dvulkan-drivers= -Dgallium-drivers=softpipe

It'll do for me, if I actually need Mesa installed at all. I still
don't think that's "stand-alone Mesa" though...

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Minimum Mesa (libGL) Build not@telling.you.invalid (Computer Nerd Kev) - 2025-10-24 08:30 +1000
  Re: Minimum Mesa (libGL) Build Lawrence D’Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2025-10-24 20:45 +0000
    Re: Minimum Mesa (libGL) Build not@telling.you.invalid (Computer Nerd Kev) - 2025-10-25 09:23 +1000
      Re: Minimum Mesa (libGL) Build Anthk NM <anthk@disroot.org> - 2025-12-01 08:36 +0000

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