Using a geometry shader on a graphics driver that supports OpenGl 3.2 but not EXT_geometry_shader4 crashes

[simonschmeisser]

When using geometry shaders in RViz (which uses ogre-1.9) it crashes because the GL rendering system in ogre-1.9 assumes that drivers support EXT_geometry_shader4 as well when they support OpenGL 3.2. With the extension it is necessary to call glProgramParameteriEXT but with pure OpenGL 3.2 this is no longer necessary and actually invalid and crashes.

The issue has been fixed for the most current release here: https://github.com/ros-visualization/rviz/pull/1725

I opened a MR to backport this to Debians ogre-1.9 package here: https://salsa.debian.org/games-team/ogre/-/merge_requests/8

It would be very helpful to backport this to Bionic and Focal (and possibly Jammy if we cannot pull before release) so that rviz can disable workarounds and enable a much faster rendering code paths to the benefit of ROS users.

[simonschmeisser (s-schmeisser)]

I created a patch for focal (applies to bionic as well). It was build on my PPA https://launchpad.net/~s-schmeisser/+archive/ubuntu/ogre-1.9-focal and https://launchpad.net/~s-schmeisser/+archive/ubuntu/ogre-1.9-bionic and tested on both Focal and Bionic with the mesa driver, amdgpu driver and proprietary NVIDIA driver (not needed there actually).

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Martin Pecka (peci1)]

I can help with independent testing on Bionic and Focal, Intel iGPU, AMD iGPU and NVidia eGPU.

So far I did a test on Bionic/AMD with RViz trying to render some more complicated scenes and everything worked as expected.

[Julian Andres Klode (juliank)]

For stable release updates, please follow the procedure outlined in https://wiki.ubuntu.com/StableReleaseUpdates

Please feel free to resubscribe ubuntu-sponsors if the SRU paperwork is filled out, we can edit the version in changelog ourselves when sponsoring, so updates to the patch are likely not needed.

Please note that bionic is now in ESM, so we only need a patch for focal.