Upcoming Qt switch to OpenGL ES on arm64

[Dmitry Eremin-Solenikov]

Hello,
пт, 23 нояб. 2018 г. в 03:18, Lisandro Damián Nicanor Pérez Meyer
<perezmeyer at gmail.com>:
>
> Hi! Please let me reply first to your last part:
>
> > Is there any possible way to support *BOTH* OpenGL / OpenGLES?  Mutually
> > exclusive from an install POV, but give the end user the choice which to
> > install?  Why should we have one Architecture forced down a path
> > different to another architecture?
>
> No, I'm afraid there is no way to do that. We did consider it many times, but
> is definitely too much work to hack on.
>
> So we need to force an architecture (actually, all of them!) to either one or
> the other.

Can you build two packages and allow user to select, which one he wants to
install? Or those packages will be binary incompatible?

> El jueves, 22 de noviembre de 2018 20:04:33 -03 Andy Simpkins escribió:
> > On 22/11/18 22:33, Lisandro Damián Nicanor Pérez Meyer wrote:
> > > El jueves, 22 de noviembre de 2018 15:37:29 -03 Dmitry Shachnev escribió:
> > >> Hi all!
> > >>
> > >> The Qt framework can be built either with “desktop” OpenGL, or with
> > >> OpenGL
> > >> ES support. At the moment we are building it with OpenGL ES on armel and
> > >> armhf, and with desktop OpenGL on all other architectures
> > >
> > > Maybe we missed to properly explain the main point of this change:
> > > currently most arm64 boards are using software rasterization because
> > > their video cards do not support Desktop OpenGL.
> >
> > I am not sure that is correct.  I certainly don't agree...
> >
> > There is no special case here.  If you have a video card in your ARM64
> > PC then it is likely the same video card that you have for an AMD64 PC -
> > i.e. it is an off the shelf PCIe card.
> >
> > Now it is correct that there is a large number of ARM64 based SoC
> > solutions out there with an embedded GPU - these are aimed mainly at the
> > mobile market (but as the computational power in these SoCs increases we
> > are already seeing that is enough for a lot of peoples 'PC' needs)
> >
> > I guess what I am trying to say here is the GPU architecture is NOT tied
> > to the CPU architecture.
>
> - GPU architecture is not tied to the arch: right.
> - Qt is tied to either Desktop or GLES: yes
>
> So we need to pick one. The question is then which one will benefit our users
> most.
>
> So far I personally know 0 people with an arm64 board with PCI slots, while I
> know many with arm64 boards with hardware GLES support.

I'm working with big arm64 iron, so for me a server arm64 board with PCIe slots
(and thus PCIe graphic cards) and on-board Aspeed "VGA card" is more common
compared to GLES-enabled arm64 SoC.

-- 
With best wishes
Dmitry