[vtk-developers] [vtkusers] Can't compile VTK with Mangled Mesa

[Berk Geveci]

>> However, since we added offscreen rendering
>> support that directly uses the OpenGL drivers, mangled Mesa is not
>> really needed anymore.
>>
> There might be a use case with an app running remotely on a cluster or some
> big machine, showing remote OpenGL graphics, but also performing some
> off-screen rendering, which would otherwise still be done across the network
> connection. Or am I overlooking something?

In the past 8 years of working with distributed remote rendering, I
have never encountered this as a use-case. Common use cases I have
encountered are:

* Remote rendering on headless cluster - use OSMesa
* Remote rendering on cluster with GPUs - use OpenGL and some sort of
hardware accelerated offscreen render if necessary

If you are piping the whole OpenGL traffic through remote display, it
would probably be acceptable to also perform the offscreen render on
OpenGL server. It would probably still outperform Mesa.

The bottom line for us is that we have limited resources and we can
only support what will satisfy most use cases. Beyond that, we have to
rely on the community to maintain code for the rest. Mangled mesa have
been enough of a burden that we are no longer interested in
maintaining it.

-berk