I thought that Avionics applications use cutdown versions of OpenGL to make thorough testing and predictability possible. This would make the OpenGL name incompatible because of the conformance tests.
Just passing the conformance tests will not be enough for your purposes although it is the technical prerequisite for using the OpenGL name, you seem to understand this. You require a much more rigorous level of testing which does not exist AFAIK. Testing OpenGL to see that it draws the right thing when asked, does not guarantee that, for example, when you call glTexSubImage2D imediately after glDrawPixels it won’t simply crash (my contrived example).
There are infinite numbers of possible scenarios like this.
I don’t see how you can test this after the fact. It requires an engineering methodology in writing the driver in the first place.
It is also probable that you don’t NEED OpenGL conformance, the dirty little secret is almost nobody REALLY has this, and there are OFFICIAL caveats in there like even conformant implementations are allowed to fail a certain number of tests.
What you need more than conformance, is stability and predictability. If a developer writes something and it doesn’t work or isn’t supported he will see that and can implement it differently. It won’t fail in mid flight, it’ll just cost a little bit of engineering time. OTOH, if you pass conformance but there’s some texture memory manager leak, or display list leak, then you’re in trouble.
So, you probably need a different type of test instead of or in addition to conformance.
You might want to limit the scope of what an application can do, for example your software engineering practices mean you won’t have memory issues, but if you’re using OpenGL display lists you’re relying on some memory management in the driver. So for instance this might be an OpenGL feature you want to avoid, this is highly speculative, I’m just trying to give you a flavor of what I mean.
Read this for more information:
http://www.opengl.org/developers/code/features/flight_decks.html
[This message has been edited by dorbie (edited 01-16-2002).]