Source: mesa Version: 25.0.4-1 Severity: normal Tags: patch Hi,
TLDR: please consider carrying this as a patch in Trixie: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/merge_requests/34685 Long story: the upload of gtk 4.18 last month broke GTK applications relying on the GL renderer on "very old drivers and hardware" as GTK upstream describes it [1]. Affected applications will refuse to open with messages like: (clapper:75218): Gsk-WARNING **: 16:04:34.205: The old GL renderer has been removed. Try GSK_RENDERER=help (clapper:75218): GStreamer-CRITICAL **: 16:04:35.334: gst_object_ref: assertion 'object != NULL' failed (clapper:75218): GStreamer-GL-CRITICAL **: 16:04:35.334: gst_gl_memory_allocator_get_default: assertion 'GST_IS_GL_CONTEXT (context)' failed ** GStreamer-GL:ERROR:../gst-libs/gst/gl/gstglbufferpool.c:151:gst_gl_buffer_pool_set_config: assertion failed: (priv->allocator) Bail out! GStreamer-GL:ERROR:../gst-libs/gst/gl/gstglbufferpool.c:151:gst_gl_buffer_pool_set_config: assertion failed: (priv->allocator) Aborted [1] https://blog.gtk.org/2025/02/01/whats-new-in-gtk-winter-2025-edition/#:~:text=Spring%20Cleaning Unfortunately, three platforms affected by this change are the imx8mq, imx8mplus and the ls1028a as they are found in the open hardware computers MNT Reform and MNT Pocket Reform. With this change in GTK, users of those platforms are stuck with Bookworm. This is unfortunate, as there are not many laptops out there which are as open as the products by MNT and my work for that platform recently even received EUR 1.400,00 sponsorship by Debian itself [2]. It would be nice if Debian Trixie continued supporting devices with Vivante GC7000 running GTK applications that require GL renderer. [2] https://mister-muffin.de/reform/funding-application.html I already approached the GTK maintainers about this but they are understandably not keen about reverting 18k line long patch. [3] Fortunately, there seems to be a relatively easy workaround for the situation. Christian Gmeiner opened a MR [4] which adds texelfetch support and with that, one can then run applications like clapper with the environment variable MESA_GL_VERSION_OVERRIDE=3.2 and things work again. [3] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/commit/af2aadbe9b4683b752eb2ee10776e36f3fd9f2a7 [4] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/merge_requests/34685 Especially having clapper working would be of great value for above platforms as clapper seems to be the only video player application which is able to take advantage of the hardware acceleration that the affected platforms offer (via hantro). Otherwise, users of those platforms will be stuck to 720p or lower quality video. I know that it is late in the freeze but the GTK 4.18 upload was also late in the freeze and the MNT Reform and MNT Pocket Reform were working just fine until the GTK upload broke applications like Clapper due to dropping the GL backend. It would be really nice if mesa in Debian Trixie could backport the relatively small and targeted improvements from above MR by Christian Gmeiner to at least have a relatively simple workaround using MESA_GL_VERSION_OVERRIDE=3.2 in the environment. Thanks! cheers, josch
