New glucose code

[Alan Hourihane]

On Thu, 2007-03-29 at 06:18 -0400, Zack Rusin wrote:
> On Wednesday 28 March 2007 11:07, Alan Hourihane wrote:
> > Carrying on from Zack's original idea and code, I've released some new
> > code on the glucose-2 branch which goes all the way to allowing xorg
> > drivers to use the xgl acceleration paths.
> 
> That is absolutely awesome. I dropped the ball on it for a few reasons (the 
> main being that i simply have too much to do and couldn't work on it). 
> Do you have any kind of roadmap or ideas about what you want to do with it? 

Start to optimise it :-)

But we need to get the DRI to deal with redirected windows, and Michel
has some ideas on that which he has created a wiki page for it.

http://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/DirectRenderingToRedirectedWindows

> I  had some technical  issues not directly related to glucose that I never got 
> to solving and I wanted to tackle those first (I think I'll send a separate 
> email about that in a bit).
> 
> One thing I wasn't 100% convinced of was how well will it perform when going 
> through whole OpenGL stack when doing simple (and small) blits or the like. 
> It's not that I couldn't sleep because of it at night (I don't sleep for 
> other reasons) but I was contemplating using DRI directly in those cases.

Some of the traditional fills/blits can be really slow. But they are
even slow in Xgl as well, so it's not glucose's fault. It's more to do
with optimisation of the 3D drivers now, and possibly even writing some
extensions that may help with utilizing the 2D engine when one is
actually available :-). But we're compositing, so it's bound to be
slower than the traditional methods. But I guess as hardware performance
improves so will this acceleration architecture.

Alan.