Quoted Jeremy Huddleston <jeremyhu@apple.com>:
George has been putting together a new libGL for XQuartz that better supports the functionality available in OpenGL.framework (I think before we only supported OpenGL 1.2, and now it should be 2.0... is that correct, George?) as well as newer GLX versions (including pbuffer support).
The pbuffer support I wrote about was just a possible design for the Mac X11 libGL. I think that design I wrote about will work for pbuffer support though. It will support the intent of the pbuffer feature, but not the ability to get pbuffer events when the offscreen region is overwritten, because AFAIK that's not possible with the OpenGL framework that we base the X11 libGL on. So you would have the fast offscreen rendering, but not the ability to know when it's been damaged, because as far as I know that's not a feature the OpenGL framework forces upon users. The GLXPixmap code is going to need quite a few changes based on my research. The existing code in the server and libGL isn't going to work from what I see.
If you make use of GLX, I highly urge you to test out this new release and provide feedback.
http://static.macosforge.org/xquartz/downloads/X11-2.4.0_alpha2.dmg
Thanks, Jeremy
For what it's worth, the new libGL is good enough to run Pymol and many other apps (with and without GLX_STEREO), but there are some known issues I want to resolve. 1. the supported GLX extension strings are most likely incorrect, because some of the features don't work yet, such as GLXPixmaps and Pbuffers. 2. GLXPixmaps 3. GLXPbuffers Thread support seems to be better. I can run the glthread demo and it works now, instead of working randomly. Shared contexts seem to work better generally. Though they need more testing. Eventually I want to run the glean test suite with the new libGL, because I suspect that will find some issues. Unfortunately the last few times I did that with the old X11 libGL it crashed the machine, so it's difficult to compare the old vs. the new in terms of test suite failures. I think those underlying issues may be fixed now though. Hopefully Jeremy has resolved the input system bugs in the 2.4.0 releases. I had some problems with input events not occurring, so the apps didn't respond to any button or key presses. George -- http://people.freedesktop.org/~gstaplin/