concerns over wayland and need for wayland app display to X Server

[David Jackson]

On Mon, Feb 27, 2012 at 1:49 PM, Pavel Sterin <codeatstake at googlemail.com>wrote:

> On Monday 27 February 2012 12:52:16 David Jackson wrote:
> > if the wayland API does not support high level vector graphics that
> itself
> > makes me skeptical of wayland, to offload rendering to the GPU requires a
> > high level vector rendering API used by apps to send vector graphics to
> the
> > window system.
> >
> > I would also be skeptical of attempts to give applications direct access
> to
> > video hardware. This opens up a whole new set of security vulnerabilities
> > by giving apps direct access to hardware.
>
> First of all, I am in no way involved in wayland so please handle my
> statements with care.
>
> From what I know, it is the very idea of wayland not to enforce its
> clients to
> use any specific drawing API: that is why there is no graphics API in
> wayland -
> just passing pixmaps + damage is enough for the compositor. On the client
> side
> you are free to use any graphics API you desire, e.g.
>
> http://cgit.freedesktop.org/wayland/weston/tree/clients/simple-egl.c
>
> is a simple client using EGL. As far as I know there is no GL client at the
> moment, because it is not possible to load libGL without loading all the X
> libs it still depends upon. So no - nobody is going to access HW directly,
> just plain old mesa.
>
>
mesa? really? I thought that the whole purpose of mesa was to render
everything that opengl provides in userspace on the CPU. mesa is useful in
cases where you you dont have a video card with a GPU or any OpenGL
capabilities, which is what video cards once were.

This gets at the question I have, how is an application going to actually
tell the GPU to render a square sized 40x40 at coordinates 30x30 , without
actually doing this rendering itself and writing it to a video buffer?

if it cant, all the application can do is use something like mesa to render
that square itself ion the computers CPU.

Increasingly it may be desirable to move rendering off the CPU into the GPU
which means your going to need an OpenGL API for an application to use to
send OpenGL commands to hardware through a driver.

just my 2¢
> Pavel
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>
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