EGL-using snaps on impish seem to be broken when using the Nvidia proprietary driver

[jamesh]

This was @zyga’s thoughts about this kind of problem from 2 years back:

Plans for sharing a GL lib

Unfortunately that solution is nearly impossible to deliver. MESA and friends (FOSS drivers) are implemented by a number of shared libraries. If you are running on top of Ubuntu 20.04 and use a snap that was published against “core16” (aka “core”) then libc from 2016 will be used as the source of symbols for a shared library compiled against libc from 2020. So we cannot do that. MESA also has a closer relationship to the kernel as many things are implemented in tandem. Nvidia uses a binary…

I don’t think any of those ideas actually got implemented though.

For the Nvidia case in particular, we might be able to get by in the short term making the last compatible user space available to snaps built on top of 16.04 libraries. But the Nvidia drivers have historically had a close coupling between the kernel and user space portions: there’s no guarantee how long that would continue to work as the host system moves ever forward.