libgbm

libgbm is the Generic Buffer Management library, a frontend to GBM which various vendors rely on to provide a GBM backend. In the case of Mesa, this will be dri_gbm, and in the case of the NVIDIA driver, it will be nvidia-drm_gbm, a symlink pointing to libnvidia-allocator.

The purpose of this variation

libgbm is a part of the Mesa project. However, the meson.build file for the project requires many options, dependencies, and targets to build just the GBM frontend.

Since other vendors will expect libgbm to be present, and often don't require anything from Mesa but libgbm, it makes sense for libgbm to be isolated.

This project was extracted from Mesa and adapted for simplicity. It is ABI compatible with Mesa's libgbm.

What else is needed

A package providing drivers for OpenGL, X.org, GBM, Vulkan, OpenCL, and other APIs should provide most of what you need on top of libgbm. However, there are some files some packages expect that only come from Mesa at this moment:

• $LIBDIR/pkgconfig/dri.pc: A pkgconfig file saying the DRI interface is installed.
• $INCLUDEDIR/GL/internal/dri_interface.h: A header file declaring the DRI interface, doesn't need a library.
• $INCLUDEDIR/EGL/eglmesaext.h: Describes the EGL Mesa EXT interface.
• $INCLUDEDIR/EGL/eglext_angle.h: The same as the previous one, but for ANGLE.

A stub can be created for $LIBDIR/pkgconfig/dri.pc, which is what NixOS does, as well as Gaming Linux From Scratch.

For the header files, only Mesa supplies them. libglvnd nor this project provide them. The good news is that they can simply be copied from the Mesa tarball or downloaded from the FreeDesktop repository.

For the Mesa tarball, you can do something like this while in the root of the extracted tarball directory (mesa-<major>.<minor>.<patch>/.), as the root user:

install -vdm755 $INCLUDEDIR/GL/internal \
                $INCLUDEDIR/usr/include/EGL

install -vm644 include/GL/internal/dri_interface.h \
               $INCLUDEDIR/GL/internal/dri_interface.h
install -vm644 include/EGL/eglmesaext.h \
               $INCLUDEDIR/EGL/eglmesaext.h
install -vm644 include/EGL/eglext_angle.h \
               $INCLUDEDIR/EGL/eglext_angle.h

For simply downloading the headers, you can use wget (or curl) instead, as the root user:

install -vdm755 $INCLUDEDIR/GL/internal \
                $INCLUDEDIR/usr/include/EGL

wget https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/raw/<major>.<minor>/include/GL/internal/dri_interface.h \
  -O $INCLUDEDIR/GL/internal/dri_interface.h
wget https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/raw/<major>.<minor>/include/EGL/eglmesaext.h \
  -O $INCLUDEDIR/EGL/eglmesaext.h
wget https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/raw/<major>.<minor>/include/EGL/eglext_angle.h \
  -O $INCLUDEDIR/EGL/eglext_angle.h

Support

Android is not supported. However, other operating systems making use of GBM are supported.