Off-screen Rendering¶
Mesa’s off-screen interface is used for rendering into user-allocated memory without any sort of window system or operating system dependencies. That is, the GL_FRONT colorbuffer is actually a buffer in main memory, rather than a window on your display.
The OSMesa API provides three basic functions for making off-screen renderings: OSMesaCreateContext(), OSMesaMakeCurrent(), and OSMesaDestroyContext(). See the Mesa/include/GL/osmesa.h header for more information about the API functions.
The OSMesa interface may be used with the gallium software renderers:
LLVMpipe - this is the high-performance Gallium LLVM driver
Softpipe - this is the reference Gallium software driver
There are several examples of OSMesa in the mesa/demos repository.
Building OSMesa¶
Configure and build Mesa with something like:
meson setup builddir -Dosmesa=true -Dgallium-drivers=swrast -Dvulkan-drivers=[] -Dprefix=$PWD/builddir/install
meson install -C builddir
Make sure you have LLVM installed first if you want to use the LLVMpipe driver.
When the build is complete you should find:
$PWD/builddir/install/lib/libOSMesa.so
Set your LD_LIBRARY_PATH to point to $PWD/builddir/install to use the libraries
When you link your application, link with -lOSMesa