drm_hwcomposer moving to fd.o

[Chih-Wei Huang]

Hey Robert, thank you for the reply.

2017-09-22 23:43 GMT+08:00 Robert Foss <robert.foss at collabora.com>:
> Hey Chih-Wei,
> On Fri, 2017-09-22 at 10:40 +0800, Chih-Wei Huang wrote:
>> Great news!
>> Thanks a lot to make it happen.
>>
>> I hope I am wrong.
>> From my understanding most x86 GPUs still
>> cannot work with drm_hwcomposer since
>> they lack of atomic mode-setting API support
>> required by drm_hwcomposer.
>> Hope this could be addressed soon since
>> drm_hwcomposer becomes a standard project of fd.o.
>
> I haven't personally run drm_hwc ontop of any x86 hardware, but there
> are people who do it.

Indeed we (android-x86 project) are the people who try to use it
but without lucky. Rob Herring also uses (a slightly modified)
drm_hwcomposer with his aosp virgl porting.
Except these I don't know any others use it on x86 hardware.
Though drm_hwcomposer is developed from Chromium
but I've heard Chrome actually use an alternative proprietary
hwcomposer in their Android Runtime for Chrome (ARC).

> The android-ia project has supported using drm_hwcomposer and an
> alternative hwcomposer, so it would think there should be no issues.

By x86 GPUs, I meant i915(i965)/nouveau/radeon/amdgpu/virgl/vmwgfx.
Among these only virgl works with the current drm_hwcomposer.
All the others don't have a ready atomic mode-setting API to use it.
That's the problem which should be addressed I meant.

The android-ia doesn't support using fdo's drm_hwcomposer I think.
They use an alternative hwcomposer [1] as you said.
It looks very different than drm_hwcomposer though
both rely on the similar (or same?) atomic API.
Android-ia's kernel has also been patched to work with it.
The vanilla kernel (at least LTS 4.9) can't work with [1]
or drm_hwcomposer.
Actually [1] only works with i915(i965) but we want
a more generic hwcomposer like drm_hwcomposer.

Please correct me if I am wrong.


[1]: git://github.com/01org/IA-Hardware-Composer

>> How about the gralloc?
>> There are also several implementations
>> scattered somewhere.
>> I think it's also important to standardize it to fd.o
>> and make it work with fd.o's drm_hwcomposer.
>
> Gralloc is a different story, and the right person to ask about it is
> not me, but maybe Rob Herring.



-- 
Chih-Wei
Android-x86 project
http://www.android-x86.org