Hi! As I understand the architecture of DirectFB this would involve mapping all surfaces in system RAM, and finally linking a layer to an X-Window... Ie there would be an X-Window hardware driver for DFB, which 'simulates' a DFB screen within an X-Window.
While I think this would indeed be a useful development tool I somehow doubt the performance would be very good. Since DFB is often used (I get the felling) for Video and graphics type applications, performance is a concern... Leaving that aside, I think basic DFB development would work OK in this environment, but more advanced things would be tricky. I'm kind of facing this problem right now: My Idea is more along the lines of running X on one screen (my normal desktop environment) and adding a PCI graphics card and a second screen on which I run the DFB applications. That also sounds like a comfy development environment. Getting DFB up and running in this configuration should not be too hard, the problems begin when you want to run XDirectFB, GTK based or other more complicated apps. Suddenly, you need to run both normal X and XDirectFB. You need a normal GTK and a DirectFB linked version. You need normal Cairo Libs and DirectFB Cairo Libs on the same system. And they're all required in specific versions for DFB, which will differ from the usual system versions... In principle this should all be reconcilable, eg in practice you may need something like a chroot environment to run DFB in... However, as I currently stand, this linking nightmare is the main difficulty, and this would be the same whether you run DFB inside X or alongside X. Richie -----Ursprüngliche Nachricht----- Von: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Im Auftrag von James Gatt Gesendet: Donnerstag, 06. Oktober 2005 10:40 An: directfb users Betreff: Re: [directfb-users] X11 backend Quoting Enrico Weigelt <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > * Kent Sandvik <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > On 10/5/05, Enrico Weigelt <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > > > Hi folks, > > > > > > is there a X11 backend/driver for directfb ? > > > > You mean x11 emulator on top of the DFB drawing primitives? Yes, and > > actually it would be good if more tested it out and reported any > > problems, or also provided possible fixes. > > You're talking about an xlib -> directfb adapter, which passes xlib > calls to directfb ? > > No, I mean quite the opposite: an directfb driver, which sends all > drawing operations to Xlib. Although this probably sounds like an odd thing - given that DirectFB is supposed to be a fast lightweight layer between API and hardware, I too would like to use DirectFB on X. The reason (for me) is simply so that I can continue to develop my DirectFB applications when all I have available is X (usually over a network). The final target platform for the application will still (in my case) be using DirectFB directly on the hardware, the use over X is purely as a development facility. It might also help to lower the barrier to adoption as to try out the DirectFB API one wouldn't need to be running DirectFB directly on the hardware. (Obviously the performance wouldn't be as good, but it's often the case that such development work is done on a considerably faster platform than the application is intended to run on.) Regards, James. _______________________________________________ directfb-users mailing list [email protected] http://mail.directfb.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/directfb-users _______________________________________________ directfb-users mailing list [email protected] http://mail.directfb.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/directfb-users
