Future of shadow and shadowfb
Adam Jackson
ajax at nwnk.net
Wed Oct 24 14:13:08 PDT 2012
Did you know we have two of these? Can we have only one of these?
I'd like to merge them together, one way or another, but there are some
slight semantic differences. shadowfb gives you hooks for both pre- and
post-rendering callbacks. Exactly one driver uses this, vmware, for
what looks like tearing down and putting back up the cursor. I'm
reasonably sure that could be better handled, but it's also easy enough
to preserve.
More interestingly, shadow batches updates until BlockHandler, whereas
shadowfb is immediate. I would expect shadow's performance to be better
in the typical use case since it would reduce overdraw. I don't know of
any drivers that _depend_ on shadowfb giving an immediate callback, but
conversely BlockHandler isn't exactly a great interface for periodic
updates, since it gets called on no particular schedule.
So my thinking is:
- port shadowfb to damage instead of handrolling it
- merge that with shadow since they'll then be largely equivalent
- keep the external API intact since it's easy enough
- hack loader to alias 'shadow' and 'shadowfb' together
Anything I'm missing here?
- ajax
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