EGL program is unusable when built with Nix

blitz · February 20, 2020, 5:12pm

I’m trying to use EGL from an application built in Nix. I’ve built a minimal example here that only tries to call eglInitialize. On Fedora, I can built it and it results in:

% mkdir build ; cmake .. ; make
% ./egl
eglInitialize says 1

If I build it with nix-build, I don’t get that far and eglGetDisplay fails. The reason seems to be that EGL tries to locate the right backend shared library to load and that fails in the Nix build. I see lots of patching regarding EGL in nixpkgs, but nothing that seems applicable.

Any pointers are appreciated.

blitz · February 21, 2020, 9:40am

So apparently I had two problems:

When building on non-NixOS, there are no hardware drivers that the program can find. The solution for this seems to be GitHub - nix-community/nixGL: A wrapper tool for nix OpenGL application [maintainer=@guibou]
When building on NixOS, the issue was mixing different nixpkgs and ending up with incompatible library versions.

So nevermind.