On Mon, Aug 18, 2014 at 03:35:16PM -0700, Derek wrote: > Hi every one > I'm currently working on VirtualMonitor in my leisure time. It allows you > to use compute/tablet/smartphone as a second monitor for your primary > computer. please refer to http://virtualmonitor.github.io for more > information. Currently I have released very basic version for > windows2000-windows7 to demonstrate the project is feasible. When I was > trying to make a further step on windows, I realized it is difficult for an > individual, as it is not open source and also without technical support > from Microsoft. > > Then I want to move to linux, and I found Ilija Hadzic's post about Virtual > CRTCs. his post is here: > http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dri-devel/2011-November/015975.html > In his implementation, GPU driver can create arbitrary number of CRTCs > (configurable by user) instead of only those CRTCs that represent real > hardware. > It is very useful not only for VirtualMonitor, but also > VNC/Virtualization/USB display etc. based on this implementation those > application will be able to take full advantage of the physical graphic > card(3D acceleration). > > I want raise Ilijia's original question agian, if anybody in this community > think Virtual CRTCs is useful, and willing to work together to make a > further progress. > My thought is if can implement a driver independent layer between dri and > vendor specific GPU driver, with some general API. maybe implement this > based one vendor related GPU first? e.g. based on Ilijia's implementation > for Radeon as a daemon? > > GPU driver is not my expertise, If some expert from this community think > this feature is interesting, and willing to initiate a project for this > feature, that will be great. Then people can work and discuss together. > > Any comments regarding to Virtual CRTC or VirtualMonitor are very welcome. > Thanks. I think the concept is overall sound (haven't looked at the old patches in detail).For the actual implementation I think a separate virtual drm driver is now the better approach, since with dma-buf and soon native fence support we can do this now properly. And especially now that we have multi-gpu support in X it should integrate almost seamlessly into X (and other display managers with multi-gpu support). Instead of requering special support in all drivers. Another thing for which iirc no one ever proposed a decent solution is synchronization to consumers of the frontbuffers for virtual gpus. So I guess the driver-private ioctl interface to make that magic work will be key. A (configurable) virtual gpu should also be really useful for automated testing, e.g. of hot-plug and unplug (both drm core and userspace). The v4l folks have such a driver (recently massively revamped for 3.18) and it looks extremely useful. For the configuration interface I guess a few simple module options to get started should be enough, eventually we can switch to configfs (or similar) to be able to configure and create/destroy virtual gpus at runtime. Just my random thoughts, probably good to kickstart the discussion with some quick patches and chat with people on #dri-devel on freenode irc. Cheers, Daniel -- Daniel Vetter Software Engineer, Intel Corporation +41 (0) 79 365 57 48 - http://blog.ffwll.ch _______________________________________________ dri-devel mailing list dri-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/dri-devel
