Compiling and Installing

Prerequisites for building
- General prerequisites
- For DRI and hardware acceleration
Building with autoconf (Linux/Unix/X11)
Building with SCons (Windows)
Building with legacy Makefiles (deprecated)
Building for other systems
Library Information
Building OpenGL programs with pkg-config

1. Prerequisites for building

1.1 General

lex / yacc - for building the GLSL compiler. On Linux systems, flex and bison are used. Versions 2.5.35 and 2.4.1, respectively, (or later) should work.

On Windows with MinGW, install flex and bison with:

mingw-get install msys-flex msys-bison

python - Python is needed for building the Gallium components. Version 2.6.4 or later should work.

To build OpenGL ES 1.1 and 2.0 you'll also need libxml2-python.

1.2 For DRI and hardware acceleration

The following are required for DRI-based hardware acceleration with Mesa:

dri2proto version 2.6 or later
libDRM version 2.4.33 or later
Xorg server version 1.5 or later
Linux 2.6.28 or later

If you're using a fedora distro the following command should install all the needed dependencies:

  sudo yum install flex bison imake libtool xorg-x11-proto-devel libdrm-devel \
  gcc-c++ xorg-x11-server-devel libXi-devel libXmu-devel libXdamage-devel git \
  expat-devel llvm-devel

2. Building with autoconf (Linux/Unix/X11)

The primary method to build Mesa on Unix systems is with autoconf.

The general approach is the standard:

  ./configure
  make
  sudo make install

But please read the detailed autoconf instructions for more details.

3. Building with SCons (Windows)

To build Mesa with SCons on Linux or Windows do

    scons

The build output will be placed in build/platform-machine-debug/..., where platform is for example linux or windows, machine is x86 or x86_64, optionally followed by -debug for debug builds.

To build Mesa with SCons for Windows on Linux using the MinGW crosscompiler toolchain do

    scons platform=windows toolchain=crossmingw machine=x86 mesagdi libgl-gdi

This will create:

build/windows-x86-debug/mesa/drivers/windows/gdi/opengl32.dll — Mesa + swrast, binary compatible with Windows's opengl32.dll
build/windows-x86-debug/gallium/targets/libgl-gdi/opengl32.dll — Mesa + Gallium + softpipe, binary compatible with Windows's opengl32.dll

Put them all in the same directory to test them.

4. Building with legacy Makefiles (deprecated)

The legacy Mesa build system is based on a collection of pre-defined system configurations. Some of these might work for older systems not supported by autoconf.

To see the list of configurations, just type make. Then choose a configuration from the list and type make configname.

Mesa may be built in several different ways using the predefined configurations:

Stand-alone/Xlib mode - Mesa will be compiled as a software renderer using Xlib to do all rendering. The libGL.so library will be a self-contained rendering library that will allow you to run OpenGL/GLX applications on any X server (regardless of whether it supports the GLX X server extension). You will not be able to use hardware 3D acceleration.
To compile stand-alone Mesa type make in the top-level directory. You'll see a list of supported system configurations. Choose one from the list (such as linux-x86), and type:
```
    make linux-x86
```
This will produce libGL.so and several other libraries
DRI/accelerated - The DRI hardware drivers for accelerated OpenGL rendering (for ATI, Intel, Matrox, etc) will be built. The libGL.so library will support the GLX extension and will load/use the DRI hardware drivers.
Build Mesa and the DRI hardware drivers by running
```
   make linux-dri
```
There are also linux-dri-x86, linux-dri-x86-64, and linux-ppc configurations which are optimized for those architectures.

Make sure you have the prerequisite versions of DRM and Xserver mentioned above.

Later, if you want to rebuild for a different configuration run make realclean before rebuilding.

Installing the header and library files

The standard location for the OpenGL header files on Unix-type systems is in /usr/include/GL/. The standard location for the libraries is /usr/lib/. For more information see, the Linux/OpenGL ABI specification.

If you'd like Mesa to co-exist with another implementation of OpenGL that's already installed, you'll have to choose different directories, like /usr/local/include/GL/ and /usr/local/lib/.

To install Mesa's headers and libraries, run make install. But first, check the Mesa/configs/default file and examine the values of the INSTALL_DIR and DRI_DRIVER_INSTALL_DIR variables. Change them if needed, then run make install.

The variable DESTDIR may also be used to install the contents to a temporary staging directory. This can be useful for package management. For example: make install DESTDIR=/somepath/

Note: at runtime you can use the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable (on Linux at least) to switch between the Mesa libraries and other vendor's libraries whenever you want. This is a handy way to compare multiple OpenGL implementations.

5. Building for other systems

Documentation for other environments (some may be very out of date):

README.VMS - VMS
README.CYGWIN - Cygwin
README.WIN32 - Win32

6. Library Information

When compilation has finished, look in the top-level lib/ (or lib64/) directory. You'll see a set of library files similar to this:

lrwxrwxrwx    1 brian    users          10 Mar 26 07:53 libGL.so -> libGL.so.1*
lrwxrwxrwx    1 brian    users          19 Mar 26 07:53 libGL.so.1 -> libGL.so.1.5.060100*
-rwxr-xr-x    1 brian    users     3375861 Mar 26 07:53 libGL.so.1.5.060100*
lrwxrwxrwx    1 brian    users          11 Mar 26 07:53 libGLU.so -> libGLU.so.1*
lrwxrwxrwx    1 brian    users          20 Mar 26 07:53 libGLU.so.1 -> libGLU.so.1.3.060100*
-rwxr-xr-x    1 brian    users      549269 Mar 26 07:53 libGLU.so.1.3.060100*
lrwxrwxrwx    1 brian    users          14 Mar 26 07:53 libOSMesa.so -> libOSMesa.so.6*
lrwxrwxrwx    1 brian    users          23 Mar 26 07:53 libOSMesa.so.6 -> libOSMesa.so.6.1.060100*
-rwxr-xr-x    1 brian    users       23871 Mar 26 07:53 libOSMesa.so.6.1.060100*

libGL is the main OpenGL library (i.e. Mesa).
libGLU is the OpenGL Utility library.
libOSMesa is the OSMesa (Off-Screen) interface library.

If you built the DRI hardware drivers, you'll also see the DRI drivers:

-rwxr-xr-x   1 brian users 16895413 Jul 21 12:11 i915_dri.so
-rwxr-xr-x   1 brian users 16895413 Jul 21 12:11 i965_dri.so
-rwxr-xr-x   1 brian users 11849858 Jul 21 12:12 r200_dri.so
-rwxr-xr-x   1 brian users 16050488 Jul 21 12:11 r300_dri.so
-rwxr-xr-x   1 brian users 11757388 Jul 21 12:12 radeon_dri.so

If you built with Gallium support, look in lib/gallium/ for Gallium-based versions of libGL and device drivers.

7. Building OpenGL programs with pkg-config

Running make install will install package configuration files for the pkg-config utility.

When compiling your OpenGL application you can use pkg-config to determine the proper compiler and linker flags.

For example, compiling and linking a GLUT application can be done with:

   gcc `pkg-config --cflags --libs glut` mydemo.c -o mydemo