Hi Laurent,

On 09/07/2011 03:31 PM, Laurent Pinchart wrote:

Hi Florian,

On Thursday 01 September 2011 18:45:18 Florian Tobias Schandinat wrote:

quoted

Hi all,

On 08/25/2011 07:51 PM, Ajay Kumar wrote:

quoted

Just as a note, there are many drivers like mx3fb.c, au1200fb.c and OMAP
seem to be doing window/plane positioning in their driver code.
Is it possible to have this window positioning support at a common place?

Good point. Congratulations for figuring out that I like to standardize
things. But I think your suggestion is far from being enough to be useful
for userspace (which is our goal so that applications can be reused along
drivers and don't need to know about individual drivers).

Beside standardizing things, do you also like to take them one level higher to 
solve challenging issues ? I know the answer must be yes :-)

The problem at hand here is something we have solved in V4L2 (theoretically 
only for part of it) with the media controller API, the V4L2 subdevs and their 
pad-level format API.

In a nutshell, the media controller lets drivers model hardware as a graph of 
buliding blocks connected through their pads and expose that description to 
userspace applications. In V4L2 most of those blocks are V4L2 subdevs, which 
are abstract building blocks that implement sets of standard operations. Those 
operations are exposed to userspace through the V4L2 subdevs pad-level format 
API, allowing application to configure sizes and selection rectangles at all 
pads in the graph. Selection rectangles can be used to configure cropping and 
composing, which is exactly what the window positioning API needs to do.

Instead of creating a new fbdev-specific API to do the same, shouldn't we try 
to join forces ?

Okay, thanks for the pointer. After having a look at your API I understand that
it would solve the problem to discover how many windows (in this case) are there
and how they can be accessed. It looks fine for this purpose, powerful enough
and not too complex. So if I get it correct we still need at least a way to
configure the position of the windows/overlays/sink pads similar to what Ajay
proposed. Additionally a way to get and/or set the z-position of the overlays if
multiple overlays overlap and set/get how the overlays work (overdraw, constant
alpha, source/destination color keying). Normally I'd consider these link
properties but I think implementing them as properties of the source framebuffer
or sink pad would work as well.
Is this correct or did I miss something?


Best regards,

Florian Tobias Schandinat