[compiz] The direct/indirect rendering stuff and compiz

[James Jones]

On Wednesday 11 April 2007 04:02 pm, Hanno Böck wrote:
> Hi,
>
> In fact, this bugged me a long time and now I'd finally like to
> have a solution:
> https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8160
>
> The issue is:
> compiz has now some fallback code to indirect rendering if direct
> doesn't work. But that's completely useless, because it'll fail
> some lines later, exactly here:
>         glxExtensions = glXQueryExtensionsString (dpy,
> screenNum); if (!strstr (glxExtensions,
> "GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap"))
>
> The issue is, glXQueryExtensionsString won't return
> texture_from_pixmap on AIGLX if LIBGL_ALWAYS_INDIRECT isn't set.


> Now, the hacky solution would be to do something like the patch I
> attached to the bug 8160.
>
> The proper solution would probably to add an optional parameter
> to glXQueryExtensionsString to force indirect rendering.
> Shouldn't be that hard, some fiddling around with stdarg/va_list.
> As this probably results in a small API-change, I wanted to have
> the opinion of the mesa-folks how to solve this best.

This is close to a proper solution.  The problem here is, and always 
has been, that there is no notion of an indirect-rendering or 
direct-rendering only extension in GLX.  GLX extensions are not 
specific to a context.  The result of glXQueryExtensionsString() 
refers to extensions available on the display connection, not the 
current context according to the GLX spec.

I believe AIGLX reports TFP in the server extension string and not 
the client extension string.  This implies the client has no 
support for the extension, regardless of whether the client is 
being used for direct or indirect rendering.  However, there is 
currently no mechanism for the client to report that it supports 
the protocol but not the direct rendering implementation.

I think the correct solution would be extendeding GLX to support the 
notion of per-context GLX extension strings, and a mechanism could 
then be added to query the GLX extensions supported by the current 
context.

Or, just do something hacky in the short term and assume all drivers 
will eventually support both indirect and direct rendering TFP in 
the near future.  This one-off, hopefully temporary problem may not 
be enough to justify a whole new extension-querying API.

Thanks,
-James Jones

nvpublic