How to design a DRM KMS driver exposing 2D compositing?

[Damien Lespiau]

On Mon, Aug 11, 2014 at 01:38:55PM +0300, Pekka Paalanen wrote:
> Hi,

Hi,

> there is some hardware than can do 2D compositing with an arbitrary
> number of planes. I'm not sure what the absolute maximum number of
> planes is, but for the discussion, let's say it is 100.
> 
> There are many complicated, dynamic constraints on how many, what size,
> etc. planes can be used at once. A driver would be able to check those
> before kicking the 2D compositing engine.
> 
> The 2D compositing engine in the best case (only few planes used) is
> able to composite on the fly in scanout, just like the usual overlay
> hardware blocks in CRTCs. When the composition complexity goes up, the
> driver can fall back to compositing into a buffer rather than on the
> fly in scanout. This fallback needs to be completely transparent to the
> user space, implying only additional latency if anything.

This looks like a fallback that would use GL to compose the intermediate
buffer. Any reason why that fallback can't be kicked from userspace?

-- 
Damien