[cairo] Re: GL backend progress report

[Jeff Kowalczyk]

On Fri, 05 Dec 2003 12:52:02 +0100, David Reveman wrote:
> If you're wondering how the GL backend is coming along, here is some
> info.

I'm a bit out of my depth with this question but is the cairo GL backend
expected to someday be functional without X? (or at least without X
running)

I do realize that vendor drivers may require X to even install, but I've
been wondering what the current capabilities of rendering to offscreen
video memory was these days, and whether cairo could support it on a
server which did not have X.

Along the same lines as interest in the without-X PNG rendering backend,
I'd very much like to someday use hardware accelerated OpenGL to do
server-side rendering of SVG with complex gradients and shading effects.
Complicated effects might only take a fraction of the time they do with
software rendering.

Presuming some scheme to queue multiprocess access to a hardware device
context, dumping an OpenGL memory buffer as JPG or PNG to the web server's
output stream would be very appealing.