[ANNOUNCE] kmscon: Lazy-web's DRM based terminal emulator

[David Herrmann]

Hi

On Wed, Mar 28, 2012 at 7:30 PM, Jesse Barnes <jbarnes at virtuousgeek.org> wrote:
> On Tue, 27 Mar 2012 16:57:29 +0200
> David Herrmann <dh.herrmann at googlemail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hi
>>
>> Motivated by Jesse's letter to the lazyweb [1] I worked on a kmscon
>> program. It provides a
>> terminal-emulator similar to the in-kernel terminal-emulator based on
>> DRM. It is written
>> from scratch and needs as external dependencies only mesa (libdrm,
>> libgbm, libEGL, libGLESv2),
>> udev, xproto (build-time dep), libxkbcommon, freetype2 and currently
>> glib (only for unicode support).
>> It uses a very recent version of libxkbcommon but it should be easy to
>> fix ./src/kbd_xkb.c if
>> you use an older version (or use --disable-xkbcommon to use a very
>> basic keyboard handler).
>
> Awesome!  Now get the distros to pick this up and turn off CONFIG_VT! :)

Heh! It might take a few more weeks until the VTE layer is as good as
the VT-emulation in the kernel. And then we still need to figure out a
way to make the kernel spit console-log to the display while
booting/etc. However, I plan to provide a prototype that works with
CONFIG_VT=n to at least get some testing environment. I'll keep
dri-devel informed if I think it's getting stable.

> Ville's comment about a texture atlas is a good one, if nothing else I
> think it should improve cache behavior.
>
> But it may be better to just do the font rendering with the CPU anyway
> (though cairo-gl is supposedly getting better), and leave the GL for
> transition effects and such.

That's what I did now and it works perfectly well. I might add other
backends in the future, though.

> --
> Jesse Barnes, Intel Open Source Technology Center

Cheers
David