Is it possible to use OpenGL in Azure App Service Linux?

Question

We are building an ASP.NET API running with .NET 5 that uses SkiaSharp to dynamically create and return images. We've noticed that using the GPU has a dramatic increase in performance. We know that in order to use the GPU we need an OpenGL Context instantiated, but with it comes some requirements. Our tests work well in our environments: Mac and Windows, but doesn't work when deployed to the Linux Azure App Service using P1v2 VM.

The error message Unable to create GL context: Unable to load shared library 'libX11'. Doing some research I realized the container doesn't have OpenGL installed and trying to install it through apt-get is not possible because of lack of permissions.

I went the route of running the KuduLite container locally in my machine and installing libgl1-mesa-glx and mesa-utils, but running glxinfo results in the error Error: unable to open display. I found this blog post that explains the requirements of running hardware accelerated OpenGL support in Docker. The blog post is from 2014 so I'm not sure if it is still valid, but if it is there quite a few requirements that before I try to solve locally in my machine I would like to know if they are even possible in Azure App Service Container.

So, is it even possible to have hardware accelerated OpenGL support in Azure App Service docker?

question from:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/66067253/is-it-possible-to-use-opengl-in-azure-app-service-linux

Answer 1

The problem you're running into is, that the machine you're running this on is headless and doesn't run a X11 display server. Most application-frameworks-for-use-with-OpenGL assume that they'll be running in some interactive graphical environment, i.e. having either an X11 server (which is configured to use the GPU) or a Wayland compositor around.

glxinfo doesn't have to do anything about this, BTW. It's just a little tool to query what kind of OpenGL capabilities a given X11 display (server) has. If you don't run X11 in the first place, you don't need it.

Up until a few years ago, this in fact was the only way to get GPU acceleration on Linux. Luckily those days are long gone. These days one can obtain fully headless, offscreen OpenGL contexts using EGL. Nvidia has a nice blog about how to do it:

https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/egl-eye-opengl-visualization-without-x-server/

Then there's this Github repo:

https://github.com/eduble/gl

You'll get the idea: Instead of opening a window you get a so called "surface" and draw on that.

With Vulkan it's even more straightforward, because you don't even have to bother setting up a surface suitable for pushing to a display if your goal is rendering an image to a buffer that you wrap up in a file or send out over a network (look at the offscreen sample in Sascha Willems' examples https://www.saschawillems.de/creations/vulkan-examples/)