Standalone OSMesa

From Gerris

On some systems OSMesa crashes when it tries to use the system's OpenGL library. The symptom of this is trying to use gfsview-batch or GfsOutputView and getting a segmentation fault looking like:

[turbine:07885] *** Process received signal ***
[turbine:07885] Signal: Segmentation fault (11)
[turbine:07885] Signal code: Address not mapped (1)
[turbine:07885] Failing at address: 0x6b0
[turbine:07885] [ 0] /lib64/libpthread.so.0 [0x7fc13fe3dc00]
[turbine:07885] [ 1] /usr/lib64/libGL.so.1(glDisable+0x7) [0x7fc140812447]
[turbine:07885] *** End of error message ***
Segmentation fault (core dumped)

OSMesa is designed to be a standalone OpenGL implementation so should not really need to link with the system's OpenGL library (/usr/lib64/libGL.so.1 in the example above). The problem is that packagers of Mesa/OSMesa on most systems (at least Debian/Ubuntu derivatives and Suse derivatives) do not seem to be aware of this and package OSMesa so that it relies on an external OpenGL library (which can be Mesa itself or any other implementation which can be graphics-hardware-dependent).

Other than asking the package maintainers to fix their packaging, the solution is to recompile OSMesa locally and make sure that the dynamic linker uses this local version as opposed to the default system OSMesa library.

This can be done by:

1. get the Mesa tarball

   wget https://mesa.freedesktop.org/archive/older-versions/7.x/7.8.2/MesaLib-7.8.2.tar.gz
   tar xzvf MesaLib-7.8.2.tar.gz
   

2. install locally with the correct options (i.e. standalone OSMesa)

   ./configure --prefix=/home/popinet/local --with-driver=osmesa --with-osmesa-bits=32 --disable-egl
   make
   make install
   

3. create symlink

   cd /home/popinet/local/lib/
   ln -s libOSMesa32.so.7 libOSMesa.so.7
   

4. modify LD_LIBRARY_PATH

   export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/home/popinet/local/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
   

5. check that the linker links with the right library:

   ldd /usr/bin/gfsview-batch3D | grep OSMesa
          libOSMesa.so.7 => /home/popinet/local/lib/libOSMesa.so.7 (0x00007f54a50c6000)
   

Installing OSMesa on fitzroy (IBM AIX 6.1)

This doesn't quite work yet. The instructions below manage to compile a static libOSMesa32.a in lib and install the GL header files. Note that this doesn't work with more recent versions of Mesa (e.g. 7.8 or 7.10).

wget ftp://ftp.freedesktop.org/pub/mesa/7.5.2/MesaLib-7.5.2.tar.bz2
gtar xjf MesaLib-7.5.2.tar.bz2
cd Mesa-7.5.2
env OBJECT_MODE=64 CC=xlc_r F77=xlf_r ./configure CFLAGS=-O2 \
    --prefix=/home/popinet/local --with-driver=osmesa --with-osmesa-bits=32 --disable-gallium --disable-egl --disable-glu
gmake -k
gmake install