Mesa Threads README ------------------- Thread safety was introduced in Mesa 2.6 by John Stone and Christoph Poliwoda. It was redesigned in Mesa 3.3 so that thread safety is supported by default (on systems which support threads, that is). There is no measurable penalty on single threaded applications. NOTE that the only _driver_ which is thread safe at this time is the OS/Mesa driver! At present the mthreads code supports three thread APIS: 1) POSIX threads (aka pthreads). 2) Solaris / Unix International threads. 3) Win32 threads (Win 95/NT). Support for other thread libraries can be added src/glthread.[ch] In order to guarantee proper operation, it is necessary for both Mesa and application code to use the same threads API. So, if your application uses Sun's thread API, then you should build Mesa using one of the targets for Sun threads. The mtdemos directory contains some example programs which use multiple threads to render to osmesa rendering context(s). Linux users should be aware that there exist many different POSIX threads packages. The best solution is the linuxthreads package (http://pauillac.inria.fr/~xleroy/linuxthreads/) as this package is the only one that really supports multiprocessor machines (AFAIK). See http://pauillac.inria.fr/~xleroy/linuxthreads/README for further information about the usage of linuxthreads. If you are interested in helping with thread safety work in Mesa join the Mesa developers mailing list and post your proposal. Regards, John Stone -- j.stone@acm.org johns@cs.umr.edu Christoph Poliwoda -- poliwoda@volumegraphics.com Version info: Mesa 2.6 - initial thread support. Mesa 3.3 - thread support mostly rewritten (Brian Paul)