It’s great to hear from you personally @narmstrong 
Thank you for taking the time to explain the lay of the land
I’m getting a better understanding now
Looking at for-instance just X11:
Right now we have available a custom X11-compatible libMali.so built by Amlogic. It has the secret sauce for communicating with the hardware and in-effect it’s providing the definitions of GL headers. Now when you have an OpenGL application the linker can hook up to to this lib and everything should work. But isn’t that all you really need? What is the role of the
kernel driver (? meson_gx_mali_450)
and
x11 driver (? xf86-video-armsoc)
Are they effectively sitting at a lower-level? The libMali.so actually communicates to the hardware through these open source drivers?