The Mesa 3D Graphics Library

Compilation and Installation using Autoconf

Basic Usage

Driver Options

  
Xlib Driver Options

  
DRI Driver Options

  
OSMesa Driver Options

1. Basic Usage

The autoconf generated configure script can be used to guess your

platform and change various options for building Mesa. To use the

configure script, type:

    ./configure

To see a short description of all the options, type ./configure

--help. If you are using a development snapshot and the configure

script does not exist, type ./autogen.sh to generate it

first. If you know the options you want to pass to

configure, you can pass them to autogen.sh. It

will run configure with these options after it is

generated. Once you have run configure and set the options

to your preference, type:

    make

This will produce libGL.so and several other libraries depending on the

options you have chosen. Later, if you want to rebuild for a different

configuration run make realclean before rebuilding.

Some of the generic autoconf options are used with Mesa:

--prefix=PREFIX

This is the root directory where

files will be installed by make install. The default is

/usr/local.

--exec-prefix=EPREFIX

This is the root directory

where architecture-dependent files will be installed. In Mesa, this is

only used to derive the directory for the libraries. The default is

${prefix}.

--libdir=LIBDIR

This option specifies the directory

where the GL libraries will be installed. The default is

${exec_prefix}/lib. It also serves as the name of the

library staging area in the source tree. For instance, if the option

--libdir=/usr/local/lib64 is used, the libraries will be

created in a lib64 directory at the top of the Mesa source

tree.

--enable-static, --disable-shared

By default, Mesa

will build shared libraries. Either of these options will force static

libraries to be built. It is not currently possible to build static and

shared libraries in a single pass.

CC, CFLAGS, CXX, CXXFLAGS

These environment variables

control the C and C++ compilers used during the build. By default,

gcc and g++ are used with the options

"-g -O2".

LDFLAGS

An environment variable specifying flags to

pass when linking programs. These are normally empty, but can be used

to direct the linker to use libraries in nonstandard directories. For

example, LDFLAGS="-L/usr/X11R6/lib".

PKG_CONFIG_PATH

When available, the

pkg-config utility is used to search for external libraries

on the system. This environment variable is used to control the search

path for pkg-config. For instance, setting

PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/X11R6/lib/pkgconfig will search for

package metadata in /usr/X11R6 before the standard

directories.

There are also a few general options for altering the Mesa build:

--with-x

When the X11 development libraries are

needed, the pkg-config utility will

be used for locating them. If they cannot be found through

pkg-config a fallback routing using imake will

be used. In this case, the --with-x,

--x-includes and --x-libraries options can

control the use of X for Mesa.

--enable-gl-osmesa

The OSMesa

library can be built on top of libGL for drivers that provide it.

This option controls whether to build libOSMesa. By default, this is

enabled for the Xlib driver and disabled otherwise. Note that this

option is different than using OSMesa as the driver.

--enable-debug

This option will enable compiler

options and macros to aid in debugging the Mesa libraries.

--disable-asm

There are assembly routines

available for a few architectures. These will be used by default if

one of these architectures is detected. This option ensures that

assembly will not be used.

--enable-32-bit

--enable-64-bit

By default, the

build will compile code as directed by the environment variables

CC, CFLAGS, etc. If the compiler is

gcc, these options offer a helper to add the compiler flags

to force 32- or 64-bit code generation as used on the x86 and x86_64

architectures.

2. Driver Options

There are several different driver modes that Mesa can use. These are

described in more detail in the basic

installation instructions. The Mesa driver is controlled through the

configure option --with-driver. There are currently three supported

options in the configure script.

Xlib
This is the default mode for building Mesa.

It uses Xlib as a software renderer to do all rendering. It corresponds

to the option --with-driver=xlib. The libX11 and libXext

libraries, as well as the X11 development headers, will be need to

support the Xlib driver.

DRI
This mode uses the DRI hardware drivers for

accelerated OpenGL rendering. Enable the DRI drivers with the option

--with-driver=dri. See the basic

installation instructions for details on prerequisites for the DRI

drivers.

--with-dri-driverdir=DIR

 This option specifies the

location the DRI drivers will be installed to and the location libGL

will search for DRI drivers. The default is ${libdir}/dri.

--with-dri-drivers=DRIVER,DRIVER,...

 This option

allows a specific set of DRI drivers to be built. For example,

--with-dri-drivers="swrast,i965,radeon,nouveau". By

default, the drivers will be chosen depending on the target platform.

See the directory src/mesa/drivers/dri in the source tree

for available drivers. Beware that the swrast DRI driver is used by both

libGL and the X.Org xserver GLX module to do software rendering, so you

may run into problems if it is not available.

--disable-driglx-direct

 Disable direct rendering in

GLX. Normally, direct hardware rendering through the DRI drivers and

indirect software rendering are enabled in GLX. This option disables

direct rendering entirely. It can be useful on architectures where

kernel DRM modules are not available.

--enable-glx-tls 

Enable Thread Local Storage (TLS) in

GLX.

--with-expat=DIR 
 The DRI-enabled libGL uses expat to

parse the DRI configuration files in /etc/drirc and

~/.drirc. This option allows a specific expat installation

to be used. For example, --with-expat=/usr/local will

search for expat headers and libraries in /usr/local/include

and /usr/local/lib, respectively.

OSMesa 
 No libGL is built in this

mode. Instead, the driver code is built into the Off-Screen Mesa

(OSMesa) library. See the Off-Screen Rendering

page for more details.

--with-osmesa-bits=BITS

 This option allows the size

of the color channel in bits to be specified. By default, an 8-bit

channel will be used, and the driver will be named libOSMesa. Other

options are 16- and 32-bit color channels, which will add the bit size

to the library name. For example, --with-osmesa-bits=16

will create the libOSMesa16 library with a 16-bit color channel.

3. Library Options

The configure script provides more fine grained control over the GL

libraries that will be built. More details on the specific GL libraries

can be found in the basic installation

instructions.