David Jackson wrote:
How does a wayland app do that? How does a wayland app tell the GPU to
render a square 30x30 at coordinate 40x40? Keep in mind, there are many
different manufacturers of GPUs and each may have different bugs and
differences in the interface to the hardware, if not a completely
different hardware interface, and an application is not going to know
about every GPU that exists.
I hope this is reasonably accurate:
1. The Wayland client app uses a special memory allocator to get a
buffer that the GPU can write to (I believe modern GPUs are being made
to remove this memory distinction, as it is a pain to handle).
2. The Wayland app uses the GL api to create a "context" and sets it up
to draw into the buffer.
3. The Wayland app makes the context "current". This is where the real
trick gets done, the OS/Driver/whatever at this point locks things so no
other task can use the GPU (or some subset of the many GPU's). The need
to support this is the primary reason low-level graphics support is
moving to the kernel, as it may be much more efficient to swap ownership
of the GPU at the same time as the CPU, instead of relying on these
contexts.
4. The Wayland app makes OpenGL calls, which linked libraries (often
called "drivers"), running in the client's process, translate to actions
on the GPU. These drivers are what hide differences between GPUs. The
app is free to mess with the GPU directly (just like the CPU, some
instructions will not work for non-privileged applications).
5. Client waits for the GPU to finish drawing, and may release the
context (otherwise it will be released when the client blocks and
another process wants the GPU).
6. Client sends command to wayland telling it to use the new image.
_______________________________________________
wayland-devel mailing list
wayland-devel@lists.freedesktop.org
http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/wayland-devel
