Upcoming Qt switch to OpenGL ES on arm64

[Dmitry Shachnev]

On Fri, Nov 23, 2018 at 09:34:44AM +0000, Andy Simpkins wrote:
> I do understand that there would be a lot of effort required to support OGL
> and OGLES but as you have already pointed out "you are doing this already"
> because OGL is provided for all platforms except armel & armhf which have
> OGLES - that means you are already tracking changes for *BOTH* ecosystems.
>
> Having OGL & OGLES available on the same architecture would be setup
> involved in creating two package streams, but once done the actual build
> process is automated. Yes there are now twice as many resulting sets of
> binaries for this layer, but it is reasonable to assume that functional
> test of each strand can be split across the testing for all architectures
> (where not automated), so the increased workload again shouldn't differ by
> much (just the supporting of the automation).
>
> I am sure my view is nieve and a little too simplistic...

Please keep in mind that not only we (the Qt maintainers) should maintain two
sets of packages, but also maintainers of third party Qt libraries and
applications.

Even in Ubuntu where the core developers can upload any package, this setup
did not work fine (they tried to maintain twin -gles packages for x86 for the
Ubuntu touch port to these architectures).

> As of today there are considerably more 'mobile' arm devices.  I suspect
> that this will continue because they are lower cost mass market products.
> Full 'desktop' on arm64 has felt very close for the last few years, but
> hardware isn't there just yet.
> There are some quite big server SoCs out there, but the desktop & laptop
> world isn't well serviced.
>
> [...]
>
> If you want to look at sheer numbers then OGLES will 'win' hands down, but
> my gut tells me that long term excluding OGL from the arm64 architecture
> would be the wrong decision

Thanks, this information is useful!

I would still like to know if the upcoming arm64 desktop devices have any
problems working with OpenGL ES.

Anyway, the decision we are making now is not permanent, we can always
revisit it in a few years like we are now revisiting the decision to stick
with desktop OpenGL.

--
Dmitry Shachnev
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