Redirected direct rendering

Also known as AWESOME. Normally, when an application renders to an X window, the contents appear in the framebuffer immediately. The COMPOSITE extensions lets an application, typically the compositing manager, redirect that rendering to an offscreen pixmap. The compositing manager is then responsible for compositing the window contents into the framebuffer, for example by mapping it onto a cube or a wobbly window. All regular X rendering respect this redirection, since the rendering requests go to the X server, which can then target it to whichever pixmap it wants.

However, the default rendering mode for accelerated OpenGL, direct rendering, is a little different. With direct rendering, the application goes through an initial setup sequence with the X server, to acquire the address of the framebuffer and the shared back and depth buffers. After this step, the application renders by programming the GPU directly to render into those buffers. This, of course, is a feature - direct rendering acheives a siginificant performance boost over having to send every request to the X server. However, the direct rendering application isn't aware that a window might have been redirected and renders to the framebuffer regardless. This is typically not what you want:

DO NOT WANT

To me, this is one of the biggest problems in our rendering stack. I'm convinced that the composited desktop has to be a standard feature of the future Linux desktop: Whether or not you want spinning cubes and wobbly windows, there is no denying the benefits of flickerless redraws and ARGB visuals. Unfortunately, with a bug like this, we can't really enable it by default. Especially when interest in OpenGL backed toolkits (clutter and pigment) is starting to pick up.

What you want, is to let the OpenGL driver know when a window is redirected and make it target its rendering to the offscreen pixmap. Conceptually, it's easy enough and we've known how to do it for a while, but there's a lot of details to get right. One of the big pieces of the puzzle fell in place with Tungstens Graphics' DRM memory manager (TTM). Dave Airlie and I added TTM support to EXA and the intel DDX driver, and from there I was able to make the DRI driver render into the TTM buffers allocated by EXA. And given that the Pixmaps for the redirected windows are now backed by TTM buffer objects, we can add a zero-copy texture from pixmap implementation to the mix:

DELICIOUS

If you want to try it out, I have the code in the exa-ttm branch in my personal drm, xserver, mesa and xf86-video-intel repositories on freedesktop.org. It's not at all easy to set up and the current implementation is only a prototype. It will be a while before this stuff can get upstream; we need to discuss how we want the interfaces between DRI/DDX/DRM/EXA to look etc, but hopefully we can figure that out at XDS.