[Mesa3d-users] OpenGL/GLX software rendering info

[Laszlo K. <Laszlo.Kovacs@Sun.COM>]

Hi All,

I am new to Mesa so please bear with me ...

What is the GLX API version supported by Mesa? I am looking at Mesa 6.5.2.

I can see from the spec that the only new API call introduced in 1.4 
(the latest) is glxGetProcAddress(). There are references in the Release 
Notes back to year 2000 to this API call. Does that mean the 1.4 version 
has been supported for a long time?

My confusion is because when I run glxinfo I see a number of versions 
displayed and I don't know what they mean.

For example on a RHEL4 server I see:

server glx version: 1.2
client glx version: 1.4
OpenGL version string: 1.2 (1.5 Mesa 6.2.1)

Also I am trying to get my head around the way Mesa works in a software 
rendering scenario. I am looking at this for a thin client so DRI does 
not make sense there. Also speed is not an issue, we just want users 
that have software rendering available if they happen to use an OpenGL 
application.

I understand from the FAQ that when software rendering is used there is 
no server side component, there is no GLX protocol used and libGL 
implements the OpenGL and GLX API on the client side (presumably with 
X11 calls).

Does this mean that in the Xorg code there nothing needs to be done to 
allow applications to do software rendering over Mesa? That the 
application uses OpenGL and GLX API calls linking against libGL and 
libGL implements the rendering with ordinary X11 calls?

That with an ordinary Xorg server without any extensions or anything 
else specially activated any application can do software OpenGL software 
rendering linking against libGL?

Thanks,

Laszlo