"mesa" platform is no longer accurate and needs renaming

[Daniel van Vugt]

Our "mesa" code and packages mostly represents support for DRM/DRI output. And the only use case for this till now also used Mesa for the libGL* implementation.

This is no longer true however. With Nvidia and AMD soon to release DRM support in their proprietary drivers, we will be supporting them. These drivers will provide DRM display access, but as usual will probably provide their own custom libGL* implementations. So won't use Mesa.

This should work for Mir. However when a vendor provides their own libGL*, we are technically no longer using Mesa at all. We will still be using the "mesa" code path in Mir though. So that all needs renaming to something more accurate like "drm" or "dri" etc. Not "mesa".

[Alexandros Frantzis (afrantzis)]

> This is no longer true however. With Nvidia and AMD soon to release DRM support in their proprietary drivers,
> we will be supporting them. These drivers will provide DRM display access, but as usual will probably provide
> their own custom libGL* implementations. So won't use Mesa.

Will they provide gbm too?

> Our "mesa" code and packages mostly represents support for DRM/DRI output.

Our mesa code is a mix of DRM/KMS, EGL and gbm. The important point for this discussion is that gbm is a mesa-specific technology.

> So that all needs renaming to something more accurate like "drm" or "dri" etc. Not "mesa".

I think "drm" is not specific enough, and "dri" is an implementation detail we never interact with directly.

If other vendors implement the full DRM, EGL, gbm triad, they are essentially implementing the "mesa" interface,
so I still think "mesa" is the most appropriate name. If they diverge, e.g., don't have gbm, we would need a new platform anyway.

Alternatives we could consider are drm-mesa, so that we could then have drm-nvidia etc for diverging implementations all based on drm.

But let's wait and see what the drivers have to offer in terms of APIs before making any decisions.

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

Saying that a driver vendor "implements the mesa interface" while there's almost no linkage to Mesa remaining is obviously confusing.

Also, gbm being part of Mesa is just a minor implementation detail. Even if a vendor used that implementation, most of their driver would be non-Mesa code.

So in both cases the word "mesa" needs to go away.

[Cemil Azizoglu (cemil-azizoglu)]

With the renaming we've done, I think for now at least we are in good shape.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package mir - 0.14.0+15.10.20150722-0ubuntu1

---------------
mir (0.14.0+15.10.20150722-0ubuntu1) wily; urgency=medium

  [ Andreas Pokorny ]
  * Fix missing ABI renaming in Mirplatform
  * Bump Mirserver platform graphics to 3
  * Fix mirprotobuf ABI break

  [ CI Train Bot ]
  * New rebuild forced.

 -- CI Train Bot <email address hidden> Wed, 22 Jul 2015 18:01:49 +0000