Dear Jiri,
it is a great pleasure to announce that, after more than 1 year of work, Display server is almost ready to hit HelenOS master.
Fantastic. Looking forward to it!
There is more detailed description in the PR. I also prepared the same information in the form of slides.
Please pardon my ignorance, I certainly could study the sources (or you might have already spoken about it in some of the recent hangouts which I have not been able to participate), but I thought it would be easier to just ask directly.
In your slides, you write: "Who needs transparent, rotating, scaling windows? (of 2012 fad provenance)".
Does that mean that that the design of the new display server makes it harder to have transparency (or alpha blending in general) and to apply various transformations to the surfaces compared to the original compositor? Or does that mean that the functionality is simply not implemented (yet), but nothing in principle precludes it from being implemented efficiently in the future?
I have had personally two motivations for demanding such features to be implemented by the original compositor:
(a) While transparency, rotating and scaling might be a fad on a desktop operating system (although I personally still believe that, with moderation, it can actually improve the user experience), it is rather essential for the UI of smartphones and other non-desktop UIs.
(b) While the usefulness of such functionality might be debatable (especially if we are talking just about rotating windows with no real UX purpose), it demonstrates the powerfulness of the graphics stack design and implementation.
A second, maybe slightly related question: You write "Possibly support HW blitters".
What about the readiness of the new design to make use of more advanced hardware acceleration? Many current GPUs do not have dedicated blitters and other 2D acceleration facilities, everything is handled by the 3D engine.
Best regards Martin Decky _______________________________________________ HelenOS-devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.modry.cz/listinfo/helenos-devel
