Hi Wookey,
This was something bouncing around in the Graphics Working Group back in the day. Alexandros as I recall was the key dev. As far as a shim goes given the effort that would have been involved and the lack of interest, it wasn't worked on.
For ARM64 and QT would a move to GLES be a "good thing?" Yes.
When it comes to graphics drivers today for arm hardware GLES is pretty universal. GLES is a standard, there is compliance through Khronos. There is a whole game industry built on top of GLES on Android devices so behavior differences between GLES implementations should in theory be the exception not the norm tho there are platform extensions that are found. (GL has the same concept)
Going forward the industry has been picking up Vulkan. Vulkan however is not universal. Vulkan has hardware requirements which for whole generations of graphics hardware (like Mali 4xx) are not able to support.
As Vulkan is becoming more central to Android's Graphics strategy, it probably would be wise for the QT types to keep an eye on that.
On Mon, Nov 26, 2018 at 7:51 AM Wookey wookey@wookware.org wrote:
A long time ago in Linaro we looked at the issue of openGL vs OpenGLES on arm, including the possibility of a shim library to make it easier for applications to switch between them.
Who knows about this and what happened/was decided?
The Debian QT maintainers are currently considering switching from building QT for arm64 for openGLES instead of openGL because there is a lot more hardware available (cheapish dev boards) with drivers supporting GLES then desktop style hardware with standard graphics card supporting 'proper GL'. Ubuntu did this 2 years ago.
Unfortunately building for 'either' seems to be very difficult due to ABI incompatibilities.
In general we don't want gratuitous difference between arm64 and x86, so this seems problematic, but I am no expert in this area and would like to talk to someone who does know about this stuff, and perhaps this needs to go back on the Linaro roadmap for fixing?
Wookey
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