drm_hwcomposer moving to fd.o

[Kondapally, Kalyan]

Hi Chih-Wei,

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.

Not sure why you have that impression. We don't carry any custom Kernel patches in our side. 

Br,
Kalyan

-----Original Message-----
From: Chih-Wei Huang [mailto:cwhuang at android-x86.org] 
Sent: Sunday, September 24, 2017 7:44 PM
To: Robert Foss <robert.foss at collabora.com>
Cc: Zach Reizner <zachr at chromium.org>; Daniel Stone <daniels at collabora.com>; Tomeu Vizoso <tomeu.vizoso at collabora.com>; Liviu Dudau <Liviu.Dudau at arm.com>; dri-devel at lists.freedesktop.org; Marissa Wall <marissaw at google.com>; Nasri, Kaveh <kaveh.nasri at intel.com>; Stephane Marchesin <marcheu at chromium.org>; Kondapally, Kalyan <kalyan.kondapally at intel.com>
Subject: Re: drm_hwcomposer moving to fd.o

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