Around 18 o'clock on Mar 13, Jon Smirl wrote: > This is true. Software Mesa can completely emulate everything and just use a > dumb framebuffer for output. The DRM driver for a dumb framebuffer is pretty > simple to write. For the smallest possible system restrict yourself to > OpenGL-ES, statically link to the software Mesa version of it and use a dumb > frame buffer driver. You'll end up with an app the same size as if you used > SVGAlib.
Everything above sounded like a really cool plan, but I'm not sure about this part. For devices which don't really want to support GL (think Tivo), I suggest that we don't want to layer graphics atop this inappropriate API. While "real" computers move to 3D-only graphics hardware, I imagine the low end will continue to be populated by nasty little 2D accelerators, and I'm sure some of those will end up running X (or other existing 2D environments). I suspect we'll need a primitive 2D API that can be used by your user-mode console program and a primitive X server, and then permit graphics driver writers to extend that in whatever weird way they want to get their video overlays or cell-phone UI running. -keith
pgp00000.pgp
Description: PGP signature
