Wayland and GPU hotswapping

[Jesse Barnes]

On Tue, 9 Nov 2010 17:34:21 -0500
Jerome Glisse <j.glisse at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Nov 9, 2010 at 8:53 AM, nerdopolis
> <bluescreen_avenger at verizon.net> wrote:
> > A feature that seems to be in some laptops, and is being worked into the Linux
> > kernel.
> >
> > Would Wayland ever be able to handle this, when the feature comes into Linux,
> > or would the display server always need to be reset?
> 
> Outcome of discussion between Dave, Kristian, Jesse and me while ridding a bus
> is that we should add a way for wayland to ask its client to redraw
> their surface
> using a another EGL driver and that wayland server should be able to handle
> client reporting failure doing so. Maybe i did get this wrong, feel
> free to correct me :)
> 
> I think to cover all use case Dave presented we should have somethings
> like this:
> -wayland provide a list of EGL driver it can texture from (optimus case where we
> can migrate texture from nvidia to intel)
> -wayland can ask to it's client to switch GL driver and report if they
> can switch or
> not (i think this should happen in 2 step first ask and gather answer
> from all client
> if one client says it can't then forbid the switch, otherwise ask to
> all client to redraw
> with new driver)
> 
> All this wouldn't need restart from wayland.

Yeah, the big advantage of this approach is that it would allow apps to
create a new context, check for extensions, etc when they receive a
"hey time to switch" request.  The alternative (shimming all the GL
calls through a wrapper and advertising the intersection of the
driver feature sets) is way more work and you end up with something
that hurts performance and functionality.

-- 
Jesse Barnes, Intel Open Source Technology Center