Whats the difference between”Stand-Alone” Mesa and the DRI drivers?
Stand-alone Mesa is the original incarnation of Mesa. On systems running the X Window System it does all its rendering through the Xlib API: • The GLX API is supported, but it’s really just an emulation of the real thing. • The GLX wire protocol is not supported and there’s no OpenGL extension loaded by the X server. • There is no hardware acceleration. • The OpenGL library, libGL.so, contains everything (the programming API, the GLX functions and all the rendering code). Alternately, Mesa acts as the core for a number of OpenGL hardware drivers within the DRI (Direct Rendering Infrastructure): • The libGL.so library provides the GL and GLX API functions, a GLX protocol encoder, and a device driver loader. • The device driver modules (such as r200_dri.so) contain a built-in copy of the core Mesa code. • The X server loads the GLX module. The GLX module decodes incoming GLX protocol and dispatches the commands to a rendering module. For the DRI, this module is basically a software Mesa
