ParaView/ParaView And Mesa 3D
ParaView requires OpenGL libraries for rendering. For machines with sophisticated graphics cards, the OpenGL libraries are typically provided by the device drivers for those cards. However, on certain machines such as supercomputers without specialized graphics hardware, one has to rely on software-based rendering alternatives such as Mesa. Mesa is an open-source implementation of the OpenGL specification.
Mesa can be configured to work within different environments ranging from software emulation to complete hardware acceleration when supported GPUs are present. This discussion only applies to software emulation.
For this discussion we will stick with Linux-based systems.
When to use Mesa
Some of the use-cases when one would build ParaView with Mesa are:
- You are building on a machine where X Window System is not available.
- You are building on a machine that has X, but you does not have graphics hardware or you still want to use software emulation for various reasons.
In case of (1) you'll have to build with OSMesa support. With newer versions of Mesa (>= 7.9), ParaView can be built with OSMesa only when the Qt GUI is disabled. Refer to #OSMesa Support
In case of (2) y
