[cairo] scaled_font fini & directfb

[Chris Wilson]

On Sun, 27 Dec 2009 03:32:33 +0100, Lionel Landwerlin <llandwerlin at gmail.com> wrote:
> Le samedi 26 décembre 2009 à 16:54 -0800, L A a écrit :
> > > Wow, somebody who is actively using the dfb backend.
> > 
> > I guess this explains why there has not been any checkins to DFB files lately.
> 
> ...
> 
> > I really doubt that I am the last one though. Actually I think you
> > might see a growing number of dfb backend users in the coming months.
> > It seems that all the embedded companies are moving to DFB, and some
> > projects based on Cairo are becoming popular (like webkit?).
> 
> I'm still interested with the directfb backend :)
> It makes sense to use directfb when you need to precisely control over
> how much graphical memory is allocated. For example X doesn't give that
> kind of control. For more, you can have plenty of logs when compiling
> directfb with traces, which gives you plenty of informations about how
> things gets done at low level (under webkit/cairo/etc...).
> 
> Chris, if you have a better thing to use than directfb, let us know.

My main issue with directfb is that it simply does not provide an
acceleration architecture that can be used by Cairo. The best performance
that I have been able to achieve so far is by talking directly to the GPUs
using DRM. (That would give you even more control than directfb). In
theory, the GL stack should come close to "bare-metal" performance. In
practice, we are still dependent upon coding for the individual
capabilities of hardware and we are still searching for better methods.
-- 
Chris Wilson, Intel Open Source Technology Centre