[Paraview-developers] VTK and ParaView with OSMesa

[Burlen Loring]

Hi All,

VTK 6.1 will take full advantage of OpenGL features in OSMesa. In the 
past this hadn't been the case, a number of key algorithms or classes 
that algorithms depended on were explicitly disabled when OSMesa was 
detected. I've been investigating use of the new 9.2.2 Mesa release in 
which OSMesa can take advantage of the VMWare's Gallium llvmpipe 
back-end. The advantages of this back-end over the classic OSMesa  
back-end are better OpenGL extension support, threading, and use of 
LLVM/clang for shader compilation. The llvmpipe backend is quite a bit 
faster on shader heavy algorithms and supports Surface LIC while the 
classic back-end does not.  In the recent Mesa 9.2.2 release it finally 
works flawlessly with pvbatch.

The Mesa 9.2.2 release configured with the Gallium llvmpipe OSMesa state 
tracker should be the recommended Mesa release for off-screen rendering 
in VTK and ParaView and I've updated the wiki with build instructions 
and some rendering benchmarks.
http://paraview.org/Wiki/ParaView/ParaView_And_Mesa_3D
I've left a link to the old page, if there are no objections I'd like to 
remove it.

I've set up ParaView and VTK dashboards for the new 9.2.2 Mesa release
http://open.cdash.org/index.php?project=VTK&filtercount=1&showfilters=1&field1=site/string&compare1=63&value1=rocky
http://open.cdash.org/index.php?project=ParaView&filtercount=1&showfilters=1&field1=site/string&compare1=63&value1=rocky

If you guys see anything wrong with it , please let me know.

Thanks
Burlen