flush

This function should only need to be called in exceptional circumstances.

As an optimization Cogl drawing functions may batch up primitives internally, so if you are trying to use raw GL outside of Cogl you stand a better chance of being successful if you ask Cogl to flush any batched geometry before making your state changes.

It only ensure that the underlying driver is issued all the commands necessary to draw the batched primitives. It provides no guarantees about when the driver will complete the rendering.

This provides no guarantees about the GL state upon returning and to avoid confusing Cogl you should aim to restore any changes you make before resuming use of Cogl.

If you are making state changes with the intention of affecting Cogl drawing primitives you are 100% on your own since you stand a good chance of conflicting with Cogl internals. For example clutter-gst which currently uses direct GL calls to bind ARBfp programs will very likely break when Cogl starts to use ARBfb programs itself for the material API.