Last weekend I could announce that KWin compiles with OpenGL ES headers. This weekend I was able to proceed even more: I got the first windows composited using OpenGL ES 2.0. Not everything is working and there is still lot’s of work to be done and it has not yet been tried on actual devices (yes you can use OpenGL ES on a desktop), but nevertheless it’s a very important step.

As it just looks like normal desktop compositing with rendering artefacts, I don’t show a screenshot. This has to wait till Present Windows (or preferable Cube) works on a mobile device 🙂

I think it is important to give some credits to those who helped me directly or indirectly:

Fredrik for providing a nice example application showing how texture from pixmap works on OpenGL ES and for all the help on IRC

Mesa/Gallium for providing ES libraries for desktop systems

Nouveau for making it possible to use ES on my notebook. Without Nouveau it would have been very difficult to do any testing on ES.

Debian for packaging Nouveau with 3D support in the experimental repository

Linaro for investigating about the possibilities for texture from pixmap on OpenGL ES

Addison Wesley for donating a copy of the fifth edition of the OpenGL SuperBible. Really a great help if you want to develop for the core profile.

Marco and Alexis for nagging about missing ES support

Marco for promising to trying out the patches on actual devices

It is incredible how clean the ES code looks compared to the glx backend. I’m really looking forward to be able to drop the legacy OpenGL code and I hope to have the ES port in a state that users can use it as a runtime replacement on desktop systems as well. It would be nice to provide users a modern compositing backend.

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