Hardware acceleration without X

Question

I was wondering if it would be possible to get graphical hardware acceleration without Xorg and its DDX driver, only with kernel module and the rest of userspace driver. I'm asking this because I'm starting to develop on an embedded platform (something like beagleboard or more roughly a Texas instruments ARM chip with integrated GPU), and I would get hardware acceleration without the overhead of a graphical server (that is not needed).

If yes, how? I was thinking about OpenGL or OpengGLES implementations, or Qt embedded http://harmattan-dev.nokia.com/docs/library/html/qt4/qt-embeddedlinux-accel.html

And TI provides a large documentation, but still is not clear to me http://processors.wiki.ti.com/index.php/Sitara_Linux_Software_Developer%E2%80%99s_Guide

Thank you.

Answer 1

The answer will depend on your user application. If everything is bare metal and your application team is writing everything, the DirectFB API can be used as Fredrik suggest. This might be especially interesting if you use the framebuffer version of GTK.

However, if you are using Qt, then this is not the best way forward. Qt5.0 does away with QWS (Qt embedded acceleration). Qt is migrating to LightHouse, now known as QPA. If you write a QPA plug-in that uses your graphics acceleration by whatever kernel mechanism you expose, then you have accelerated Qt graphics. Also of interest might be the Wayland architecture; there are QPA plug-ins for Wayland. Support exists for QPA in Qt4.8+ and Qt5.0+. Skia is also an interesting graphics API with support for an OpenGL backend; Skia is used by Android devices.

Getting graphics acceleration is easy. Do you want compositing? What is your memory foot print? Who is your developer audience that will program to the API? Do you need object functionality or just drawing primitives? There is a big difference between SKIA, PegUI, WindML and full blown graphics frameworks (Gtk, Qt) with all the widget and dynamics effects that people expect today. Programming to the OpenGL ES API might seem fine at first glance, but if your application has any complexity you will need a richer graphics framework; Mostly re-iterating Mats Petersson's comment.

Edit: From the Qt embedded acceleration link,

1. CPU blitter - slowest
2. Hardware blitter - Eg, directFB. Fast memory movement usually with bit ops as opposed to machine words, like DMA.
3. 2D vector - OpenVG, Stick figure drawing, with bit manipulation.
4. 3D drawing - OpenGL(ES) has polygon fills, etc.

This is the type of drawing you wish to perform. A framework like Qt and Gtk, give an API to put a radio button, checkbox, editbox, etc on the screen. It also has styling of the text and interaction with a keyboard, mouse and/or touch screen and other elements. A framework uses the drawing engine to put the objects on the screen.

Graphics acceleration is just putting algorithms like a Bresenham algorithm in a separate CPU or dedicated hardware. If the framework you chose doesn't support 3D objects, the frameworks is unlikely to need OpenGL support and may not perform any better.

The final piece of the puzzle is a window manager. Many embedded devices do not need this. However, many handset are using compositing and alpha values to create transparent windows and allow multiple apps to be seen at the same time. This may also influence your graphics API.

Additionally: DRI without X gives some compelling reasons why this might not be a good thing to do; for the case of a single user task, the DRI is not even needed.

The following is a diagram of a Wayland graphics stack a blog on Wayland.