Cross compiling Mesa for Windows

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NB! Current Qt versions ship a build as opengl32sw.dll in the official binary packages. Builds are also available at http://download.qt.io/development_releases/prebuilt/llvmpipe/windows/ For instructions on recreating those builds on Windows with MSVC2015, see MesaLlvmpipe.

QtQuick 2.0 applications require OpenGL 2.1 or higher to run. Windows only provides OpenGL 1.1 by default, which is not sufficient. One workaround is to use ANGLE which implements the OpenGL ES 2 API on top of DirectX 9. The benefit of using ANGLE is that the graphics are hardware-accelerated but ANGLE requires Windows Vista or later. The other option is to use a software renderer such as Mesa which can run on Windows XP or later and may perform better than ANGLE when running inside virtual machines.

This article describes the process of cross-compiling Mesa for Windows on Arch Linux. The result is an opengl32.dll DLL that you can copy to the folder containing your application's executable to use Mesa LLVMpipe software rendering.

Cross compiling is currently the only method that can compile the latest versions of Mesa for Windows using GCC. Compiling Mesa natively on Windows using GCC with Scons results in "the command line is too long" error during linking. There are known issues when compiling Mesa with optimizations using Visual Studio 2010. Compiling with Visual Studio 2012 is possible but requires Windows 7 and the default platform target does not support Windows XP. It is possible to cross compile using Cygwin or MSYS2 Scons.

Prebuilt binaries for Mesa are available from the MSYS2 project:

• Mesa 10.0.2 for Windows 32-bit binary
• Mesa 10.0.2 for Windows 64-bit binary

The library is also shipped with QtCreator in QtCreator\bin\opengl32sw.dll.

Install required Arch Linux packages

sudo pacman -S base-devel mingw-w64-toolchain libxml2 python2 scons

Compiling for Windows 32-bit

Create a working directory for build

mkdir ~/mesa_win32
cd~/mesa_win32

Download LLVM and Mesa sources

wget http://llvm.org/releases/3.4/llvm-3.4.src.tar.gz
wget ftp://ftp.freedesktop.org/pub/mesa/10.0.2/MesaLib-10.0.2.tar.bz2

For LLVM build zlib is also needed. (Build steps taken from here: http://stackoverflow.com/a/26021820/754982)

wget http://zlib.net/zlib-1.2.8.tar.gz

Extract sources

tar -xvf llvm-3.4.src.tar.gz
tar -xvf MesaLib-10.0.2.tar.bz2
tar -xvf zlib-1.2.8.tar.gz

Build zlib

cd zlib-1.2.8
#  automatic replacement
sed -e s/"PREFIX ="/"PREFIX = i686-w64-mingw32-"/ -i win32/Makefile.gcc
BINARY_PATH=/usr/i686-w64-mingw32/bin INCLUDE_PATH=/usr/i686-w64-mingw32/include LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/i686-w64-mingw32/lib make -f win32/Makefile.gcc
BINARY_PATH=/usr/i686-w64-mingw32/bin INCLUDE_PATH=/usr/i686-w64-mingw32/include LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/i686-w64-mingw32/lib make -f win32/Makefile.gcc install

Build LLVM

cd ~/mesa_win32/llvm-3.4
export PYTHON=/usr/bin/python2
mkdir build
cd build
echo 'ac_cv_have_decl_strerror_s=${ac_cv_have_decl_strerror_s=no}' > config.cache
../configure -C —prefix=$HOME/mesa_win32/llvm-3.4.build —host=i686-w64-mingw32 —enable-optimized —disable-assertions —disable-pthreads —enable-targets=x86 —enable-bindings=none —disable-libffi —with-c-include-dirs=/usr/i686-w64-mingw32 —with-gcc-toolchain=/usr/i686-w64-mingw32 —with-default-sysroot=/usr/i686-w64-mingw32
make
make install

Note: Use of the strerror_s function is disabled by writing an entry to config.cache for Windows XP compatibility.
Note2: Make sure that libraries and includes are copied to /usr/i686-w64-mingw32/lib and /usr/i686-w64-mingw32/include directories. If not, copy them manually.

Build Mesa

cd~/mesa_win32/Mesa-10.0.2
export LLVM=$HOME/mesa_win32/llvm-3.4.build
LDFLAGS="-static -s" scons build=release platform=windows toolchain=crossmingw machine=x86 libgl-gdi
mkdir ~/mesa_win32/dist
cp -a build/windows-x86/gallium/targets/libgl-gdi/opengl32.dll~/mesa_win32/dist/

Note: If you are compiling a newer version of mesa, export CXXFLAGS="-std=c++11" might be needed before running scons.
Note2: If the build fails because the macro M_PI_2 isn't defined in file src/glsl/builtin_functions.cpp you can solve it by copying following lines to the file (after #include <math.h>)

#define M_PI_2          1.57079632679489661923
#define M_PI_4          0.78539816339744830962

Complete

You can now copy opengl32.dll from the ~/mesa_win32/dist folder to the folder containing your application's executable.
Your Qt must be compiled with Desktop OpenGL to use opengl32.dll. The ANGLE build will not load the mesa library.
If you are using QT 5.4 and above then rename the library to opengl32sw.dll. That way it will be used after standard OpenGL and ANGLE fail.

Compiling for Windows 64-bit

Create a working directory for build

mkdir~/mesa_win64
cd ~/mesa_win64

Download LLVM and Mesa sources

wget http://llvm.org/releases/3.4/llvm-3.4.src.tar.gz
wget ftp://ftp.freedesktop.org/pub/mesa/10.0.2/MesaLib-10.0.2.tar.bz2

Extract sources

tar -xvf llvm-3.4.src.tar.gz
tar -xvf MesaLib-10.0.2.tar.bz2

Build LLVM

cd~/mesa_win64/llvm-3.4
export PYTHON=/usr/bin/python2
mkdir build
cd build
echo 'ac_cv_have_decl_strerror_s=${ac_cv_have_decl_strerror_s=no}' > config.cache
../configure -C —prefix=$HOME/mesa_win64/llvm-3.4.build —host=x86_64-w64-mingw32 —enable-optimized —disable-assertions —disable-pthreads —enable-targets=x86_64 —enable-bindings=none —disable-libffi —with-c-include-dirs=/usr/x86_64-w64-mingw32 —with-gcc-toolchain=/usr/x86_64-w64-mingw32 —with-default-sysroot=/usr/x86_64-w64-mingw32
make
make install

Note: Use of the strerror_s function is disabled by writing an entry to config.cache for Windows XP x64 compatibility.

Build Mesa

cd ~/mesa_win64/Mesa-10.0.2
LDFLAGS="-static -s" scons build=release platform=windows toolchain=crossmingw machine=x86_64 libgl-gdi
mkdir~/mesa_win64/dist
cp -a build/windows-x86_64/gallium/targets/libgl-gdi/opengl32.dll ~/mesa_win64/dist/

Complete

You can now copy opengl32.dll from the~/mesa_win64/dist folder to the folder containing your application's executable.