Khronos Releases EGL 1.5 Specification

March 19, 2014 – San Francisco, Game Developer’s Conference – The Khronos™ Group today announced the ratification and release of the EGL™ 1.5 specification. EGL is an open, royalty-free standard that defines a portable interface to underlying operating system and display platforms to handle graphics context management, surface and buffer binding, and rendering synchronization. EGL also provides interop capability to enable efficient transfer of data and events between Khronos APIs. The new EGL 1.5 specification incorporates functionality for enhanced rendering flexibility and security, improved interop between OpenGL® or OpenGL ES™ and OpenCL™ for mixed compute and rendering acceleration, and standardized support for multiple common operating systems including Android and 64-bit platforms. The EGL 1.5 specification, header files and links to feedback forums are available at: www.khronos.org/egl.

“Although EGL is in widespread use, it sometimes does not enjoy the same visibility as other Khronos APIs; but it is increasingly playing a crucial role in the Khronos ecosystem as it evolves into the central hub for interoperability between multiple APIs on multiple underlying platforms,” said Alon Or-bach, senior software engineer at Samsung Electronics and chair of the EGL working group. “EGL 1.5 is a significant step to enabling access to proven and needed functionality across a wide variety of platforms including Android, X Windows and Ubuntu-based systems.”

EGL 1.5 Features

• EGLImage objects as core functionality. EGLImages are already widely supported through optional extensions and provide significant flexibility to graphics applications by enabling sharing of OpenGL and OpenGL ES textures and renderbuffers between contexts;
• Robustness support that places restrictions on the creation of a graphics context to prevent malicious usage, especially important for secure WebGL implementations;
• Enhanced support for 64-bit platforms by avoiding size-dependence in APIs taking pointers, enabling standardized usage of EGL on both 32-bit and 64-bit operating systems;
• EGL Platform extensions for Android, GBM, Wayland and X11 to cleanly define how each platform/OS interacts with EGL to enable a single EGL implementation to dynamically support multiple windowing systems;
• Enhanced OpenCL interop through the creation of EGLSync objects from OpenCL events to enable synchronization between OpenGL and OpenGL ES commands and OpenCL command queues, minimizing or even avoiding CPU involvement when synchronizing GPU work performed in different APIs;
• EGL fence sync objects as core functionality to provide the ability to insert fences in client API command streams (e.g. OpenGL or OpenGL ES), which can then be used to synchronize with the user process at a tighter granularity than APIs like glFinish (client-side waiting), or between command streams without any user process involvement (server-side waiting);
• EGLContext improvements that enable making a context current without association to a surface, and simplifying how applications that only want to render to client API targets (such as OpenGL framebuffer objects) obtain contexts;
• Support for sRGB colorspace rendering in OpenGL ES, using a standard defined color space and simplifying support for gamma-correct blending and scaling;
• Control of graphics reset notification behavior, allowing applications to detect a graphics reset through an inexpensive query.

About The Khronos Group

The Khronos Group is an industry consortium creating open standards to enable the authoring and acceleration of parallel computing, graphics, vision, sensor processing and dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. Khronos standards include OpenGL®, OpenGL® ES, WebGL™, OpenCL™, SPIR™, SYCL™, WebCL™, OpenVX™, OpenMAX™, OpenVG™, OpenSL ES™, StreamInput™, COLLADA™ and glTF™. All Khronos members are enabled to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests. More information is available at www.khronos.org.

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