Subject: bug#49847: OpenGL applications may fail to run on foreign distributions

From: Maxim Cournoyer <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 03 Aug 2021 13:33:06 -0400

Hello Guix,

I recently discovered that on systems that used another implementation
of OpenGL than those provided by Mesa (such as systems using the
proprietary nvidia or AMD drivers), the OpenGL application would crash,
sometimes even requiring a reboot of the host system to recover!

While the issue could be dismissed due to the use of proprietary drivers
on these systems, I think in theory there might be issues also when mix
and matching Guix's Mesa libGL along the foreign distro kernel (which
may run Mesa but from a much older/or recent version).

I also think that it is quite surprising that graphical applications
distributed with Guix packs fail to be 'universal' in the way we've come
to know them for CLI applications.

It appears this issue may have a solution in enabling libglvnd [0]
support in our Mesa so that the GPU hardware vendor provided libGL.so
could be loaded from the system instead.

Thanks,

Maxim

[0]  https://github.com/NVIDIA/libglvnd/