On Tue, 26 Apr 2011 11:01:30 +0100 Alan Cox alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk wrote:
A lot of older hardware had one overlay that could be sourced to any crtc, just not simultaneously. The tricky part is the formats and capabilities: alpha blending, color/chromakey, gamma correction, etc. Even the current crtc gamma stuff is somewhat lacking in in terms of what hardware is capable of (PWL vs. LUT, user defined conversion matrices, gamut remapping, etc.).
Rather than re-inventing enough wheels to run a large truck would it not make sense to make hardware sourced overlays Video4Linux objects in their entirity so you can just say "attach V4L object A as overlay B"
That would provide format definitions, provide control interfaces for the surface (eg for overlays of cameras such as on some of the Intel embedded and non PC devices), give you an existing well understood API.
For some hardware you are going to need this integration anyway so that you can do things like move a GEM object which is currently a DMA target of a capture device (as well as to fence it).
For a software surface you could either expose it as a V4L object that is GEM or fb memory backed or at least use the same descriptions so that the kernel has a consistent set of descriptions for formats and we don't have user libraries doing adhoc format translation crap.
A lot of capture hardware would map very nicely onto GEM objects I suspect and if you want to merge live video into Wayland it seems a logical path ?
Thanks Alan, of course that's a good idea, I'll see about integrating the two.