Mesa's Gallium3D/llvm needed with nvidia-drivers?

[NathanZachary]

Hello all,

I've been reading up on the various OpenGL implementations, and delved a little more deeply into them today when a system update wanted to pull in many additional dependencies. I found that the cause of the additional dependencies was llvm-4.x. As I use the proprietary nvidia-drivers, is there even a need for me to have Gallium3D or llvm support within mesa (or mesa at all, for that matter)? The more I look at it, it seems like the proprietary nvidia-drivers should completely replace mesa. If that's the case, I can get rid of it, llvm, and all of these new dependencies.

Any thoughts or considerations? Will that negatively impact any virtual machines within VirtualBox that don't have direct GPU access?

Thanks for helping me further my understanding.

Cheers,
Nathan Zachary
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[Roman_Gruber]

If your graphics card supports OpenGL natively, then you may not need it. There are packages that depend on mesa.

It seems kde (i need k3b) depends on it.

[Ant P.]

Set USE=-doc on llvm-4.0 to make all the nasty surprise deps go away. It forces the default to on for no good reason.

[NathanZachary]

[Jaglover]

When I had nVidia card the only application that required MESA in my desktop was Firefox, and it was build-time dependency. After FF was installed I could remove MESA and everything kept working just fine.
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[Leio]

You might need mesa for OpenGL/GLES/EGL/etc standard headers, that is buildtime. nvidia-drivers doesn't provide them (with good reason).
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