In search for a better way to handle GPU offloading

[Jonas Ådahl]

On Wed, Apr 10, 2024 at 02:46:30PM +0200, Werner Sembach wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I'm task to evaluate a better way to handle GPU offloading then it's
> currently done on Linux with environment variables.
> 
> The Goal is to have some kind of GUI editable database/config file where the
> user can add and remove binaries/programs.
> 
> For this I would like to push
> https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/glvnd/libglvnd/-/merge_requests/224 and
> https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/glvnd/libglvnd/-/merge_requests/228 as it
> seems to be a good basis for exactly this. However the discussion on them is
> stale, not because of technical difficulties, but because of lack of
> interest it seems.

I'm not convinced a specialized format stored somewhere is necessarily a
good idea in how to achieve this. A really global list would have to be
managed by root, and would it be a configuration file stored somewhere
in $HOME, it would now be inaccessible to sandboxed applications.

For OpenGL/Vulkan clients using Wayland I imagine something that doesn't
use environment variables can be achieved using the linux_dmabuf
protocol, which has the concept of "preferred main device". If
applications are configured in whatever way, and if there is integration
with the Wayland compositor, perhaps this way is a better option.

It'll leave compositors and desktop environments more free to make
decisions how to present and store user preferences, which I think makes
much more sense than a text file and matching rules on
/proc/<pid>/cmdline, which seems really terrible from a UX perspective.

I realize X11 is a different story, I suspect something similar to the
Wayland protocol would need to be invented there to achieve something
similar, but I don't really know the details about how X11+EGL and GLX
works.


Jonas

> 
> Are there other people here interested in this topic?
> 
> Best regards,
> 
> Werner Sembach
>