Proposal for a low-level Linux display framework

[Laurent Pinchart]

On Thursday 15 September 2011 19:05:00 Alan Cox wrote:
> On Thu, 15 Sep 2011 10:50:32 -0500
> Keith Packard wrote:
> > On Thu, 15 Sep 2011 18:29:54 +0300, Tomi Valkeinen wrote:
> > > 1) It's part of DRM, so it doesn't help fb or v4l2 drivers. Except if
> > > the plan is to make DRM the core Linux display framework, upon which
> > > everything else is built, and fb and v4l2 are changed to use DRM.
> > 
> > I'd like to think we could make DRM the underlying display framework;
> > it already exposes an fb interface, and with overlays, a bit more of the
> > v4l2 stuff is done as well. Certainly eliminating three copies of mode
> > setting infrastructure would be nice...
> 
> V4L2 needs to interface with the DRM anyway. Lots of current hardware
> wants things like shared 1080i/p camera buffers with video in order to do
> preview on video and the like.

Buffers sharing is a hot topic that has been discussed during Linaro Connect 
in August 2011. Even though the discussions were aimed at solving ARM-related 
embedded issues, the solution we're working on is not limited to the ARM 
platform and will allow applications to pass buffers around between device 
drivers from different subsystems.

> In my semi-perfect world vision fb would be a legacy layer on top of DRM.
> DRM would get the silly recovery fail cases fixed, and a kernel console
> would be attachable to a GEM object of your choice.

-- 
Regards,

Laurent Pinchart