desktop-shell: How to enable really alpha blending of weston background?

Sat Mar 12 19:33:40 UTC 2016

I have to bring this up, because it's not necessarily true. There's
something you're missing. After working on embedded SoCs, I realize
that a lot of them put the YUV video plane *behind* the main RGB
plane. This allows them to do subtitles and OSD controls over the
video without stacking it RGB -> YUV -> RGB, as you might imagine.

Thankfully, some of these systems allow you to put the video on top of
RGB, but not all. Some even just have two YUV planes (for
picture-in-picture) and one RGB plane on top, not even a cursor plane.

On embedded systems where they have fullscreen control, they simply
render alpha-graphics into the RGB window, and then stack a YUV plane
behind it to blend against.

Wayland, in its current subsurface architecture, can't support this
system, unfortunately. The best thing I could think of here was to
have Wayland consider a punch-through when it sees a YUV plane stacked
under an RGB one from the same client, and it knows the scanout is
ARGB. But maybe that's too auto-magical.

I think that could work, but the implementation would need to be
tricky about all the special cases, if we cared enough to make those
work, e.g. surfaces under the punch-through need to be knocked out,
but surfaces above can't be, since they're stacked on top. And that
implies surfaces under the punch-through can't themselves use
overlays, etc.

On Tue, Feb 23, 2016 at 1:29 AM, Pekka Paalanen <ppaalanen at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 23 Feb 2016 10:11:39 +0900
> YoungJun Jo <dtoartist at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hello,
>>
>> Thanks for your reply.
>>
>> What i want is alpha blending for my chips.
>> As i mentioned, My chips have four independent H/W overlays.
>>
>> For example,
>> H/W Overlay 1 => Weston, Applications, etc..
>> H/W Overlay 2 => Video play.
>> H/W Overlay 3 = > Empty.
>> H/W Overlay 4 = > Empty.
>>
>> I also know that weston don't know H/W Overlays above mentioned.
>
> Hi,
>
> ok. The current state of Weston is slightly sad, as the support for
> hardware overlays is disabled by default, because enabling it causes
> performance problems. All that will be fixed once the patch series to
> support atomic/nuclear KMS in the DRM backend by Daniel Stone will
> land. I think Daniel is polishing it for submission whenever he has
> time for it.
>
> I would expect the situation to improve for Weston 1.11, but that's no
> promise.
>
> Btw. if you are using an fbdev backed, you have already lost: it will
> never support hardware overlays. Use the DRM-backend instead. It is
> possible to activate overlay support already with the debug key binding
> Mod+Shift+space, v.
>
>> Scenario:
>> 1. If i click play button on my video application, it will be call alpha
>> blending API.
>> 2. When weston receives alpha blending api, weston background will be
>> transparent.
>> 3. And i could see video playing from H/W Layer 2.(Still H/W Layer1 shows
>> GUI of video control buttons)
>>
>> So i want really alpha blending of weston background.
>
> I suppose you could do it like that, assuming that:
> - you will only ever support your one special video player
> - your video player is not cooperating with the display server, but it
>   is bypassing the display server instead and holding the display
>   server as a hostage (otherwise the display server, e.g. weston, can
>   mess up your video view)
> - your video player is likely specific to your hardware and cannot work
>   elsewhere
> - you will have to use a modified Weston, as upstream will never accept
>   what you would need for this
> - you will need to create a protocol extension for the "alpha blending
>   API" or whatever to tell weston to get out of the way
> - you won't have any application window mapped while playing e.g.
>   fullscreen video
> - you will waste power by always having to have a fullscreen completely
>   transparent overlay on top the video overlay, rather than having the
>   video on the top-most overlay
>
> and probably many more limitations that make the approach very painful
> to use in anything but a simple single-purpose device with a throw-away
> software stack.
>
> Essentially, you are using a display server (weston) to get a window
> system, and then your aim is to remove the window system and bypass the
> display server, telling weston to not mess with your video player.
>
> Btw. I forgot a few things earlier. Not only you need to have the
> backend tell the renderer use an alpha-capable framebuffer format, you
> also need to hack clients/desktop-shell.c to not force the background
> to be opaque. I'm not sure, but there might also be further things to
> adjust in a backend to make sure the alpha bits actually get into the
> hardware.
>
>
> The proper solution using Wayland and Weston as they are intended would
> involve the following:
> - ensure your display hardware has proper DRM drivers supporting atomic
>   KMS
> - wait for the atomic support to land in Weston, which...
> - puts Weston in control of all hardware planes, so that...
> - Weston will automatically use all hardware planes for everything it
>   can
> - use any general purpose video player you want which supports
>   linux_dmabuf Wayland protocol extension...
> - and that will get the video on the hw overlay automatically when it
>   is possible, and through hardware accelerated composition when the
>   overlay cannot be used.
>
> When the video player uses EGL or linux_dmabuf to push the video frames
> to Weston, then Weston has the possibility to show them on a hardware
> overlay.
>
> As Weston will be in charge of everything on the display, the
> fullscreen video playback won't suffer from the same waste of power as
> your approach.
>
> The proper solution is likely to result in a near-optimal use of
> hardware resources in all cases automatically, both where overlays can
> and cannot be used. The proper solution is also generic in that it is
> not tied to a particular hardware platform.
>
> In summary, do what you must, but I would strongly recommend the proper
> solution if at all possible for you.
>
>
> Thanks,
> pq
>
>> 2016-02-22 21:36 GMT+09:00 YoungJun Jo <dtoartist at gmail.com>:
>>
>> > Environment
>> > OS : Linux kernel 3.10
>> > Version : Weston 1.8.0
>> > H/W spec : embedded soc based on ARM
>> >
>> > Hello, All
>> >
>> > I have a question about weston background.
>> > I want enable alpha blending to background, so i have typed
>> > 'background-color=0x00ffffff' on weston.ini.
>> > But that's not really alpha blending. Because alpha value of pixel is a
>> > 'ff'.
>> > My chips have four H/W layers, top of the layer is UI layer and second
>> > layer is video layer.
>> >
>> > I reviewed source code of 'desktop-shell.c' but i can't find any hints.
>> >
>> > Need some additional ideas to solve this problem. Any feedback is
>> > appreciated.
>> >
>> > Thanks.
>> >
>
>
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-- 
  Jasper