So I think we do have enough people interested in this and should be able to cobble together something that does The Right Thing.
We indeed have a non-trivial set of people interested in the same set of problems and each of us has partial and maybe competing solution. I want to make it clear that my, maybe disruptive and different from the plan-of-record, proposal should not be viewed as destructive or distracting. I am just offering to the community what I think is useful.
If this discussion sparks some joint effort that will bring us to the solution that everyone is happy with, even if no line of my code is found useful, I am perfectly fine with that (and I'll join the effort).
So at this point I think I should put out my back-of-the-napkin desiderata. That will hopefully shed some light on where I am coming from with VCRTCM proposal.
I want to be able to pull pixels out of the GPU and redirect them to an arbitrary device that can do something useful with them. This should not be limited to shooting photons into human eyeballs. I want to be able to run my applications without having to run X. I'd like the solution to be transparent to the application; that is, if I can write an application that can render something to a full screen, I want to redirect that "screen" to wherever I want without having to rewrite, recompile or relink the application. Actually, I want to do that redirection at runtime. I'd like to support all of the above in a way that it can also help solve more imminent shotcomings of Linux graphics system (Optimus, DisplayLink, etc. ... cf. previous E-mails in this thread). I'd like it to work with multiple render nodes on the same GPU (something like Dave's multiseat work, in which both GPU and its display resources are virtual).
The logical consequence of this is that the render node and the display node should at some point become logically separate (different driver modules) even if they are physically on the same GPU. They are really two different subsystems that just happen to reside on the same circuit board, so it makes sense to separate them.
I don't think what I am saying is anything unique and what I said probably overlaps in good part with what others also want from the graphics subsystem. I can see the role of VCRTCM in all of the above, but I am open-minded. If we end up with a solution that has nothing to do with VCRTCM, I have no emotional ties with my code (and code of my colleagues that worked with me so far).
-- Ilija _______________________________________________ dri-devel mailing list dri-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/dri-devel
