Working with libdrm, repainting timeline

linux |
As the taiwins project finished with X11/Wayland backend rigging. Now I am fully on the libdrm backend development, dealing with hardwares directly. This backend requires 200 percent my energy to tame the complexity. Like other backends, libdrm also needs to provide two resources, input and output. Backends like nested wayland backend or X11 backend, the output device are the windows created by ourselves (or by the user). Meaning we can create it or destroy it as we please.

August 2020 Status Update

Journal |
It is a sunny day, somehow I got up early this morning. The cool, chilling breath of air reminded me we are at the tail of the summer. It felt so strange, this summer was like it was never here. Hiking, go swimming, taking a trips and night outs. all those experiences for a normal summer I would do, they are all absent, hope I don’t regret too much for crunching code at home all these months.

July 2020 Status Update

Journal |
July, the hottest month in Montreal every year. The heat wave rushes to you when you walk outside makes you wondering if you are in some tropical island, it sure doesn’t look like living at 45 latitde northen hemisphere. Last month was a rapid leap towards wayland objects implementations and now I just hitted the wall of xdg-shell protocol. Today I’d like to talk about what it is like to implement a wayland protocol.

June 2020 Status Update

Journal |
Montréal is hotter than ever in this month, under the broiling sun, it was an exhausting quarantine. The first month I remeber I was feeling fortunate I got this aleatory chance for advancement of taiwins in this global pandemic, right now all I felt was the painful experience converting all the Taiwins server code away from libweston. Implementating of server side wayland objects was indeed unpleasant experience. Without libweston, I have to implement every little thing and get it right, even the basics 2D homogenous matrix operations for coordinates transformations.

Libweston vs Wlroots

wayland |
You need a wayland compositor library to create a wayland server. Wayland is a protocol, itself, cannot do much, long time ago I used to think the server-side wl_resource represents some structure you can operate on, well it turned out all you do with it is handling messages between client and server. All the logic you need to implement yourself. There were a few attempts to wayland compositing library created. The first sucessful one is wlc.

wl_data_device

wayland |
wl_data_device interface in the base wayland protocol is the most complex one, in my opinion, wayland.xml explains it fairly well, but every pieces are scattered in the file, here I serialize it together, give you quick run through. In brief, data device in wayland consists of four interfaces: The first is wl_data_device_manager, it is the global. The second is wl_data_device, can be created from wl_data_device_manager for a given seat, it is used to set selection(ctrl-c ctrl-v) and drag-n-drop.

May 2020 Status Update

Journal |
Forcing a monthly blog update seems to be a good idea, giving myself a reason to keep paying for this Domain. Also, I don’t usually has a topic to address specifically, a monthly update can fill this role. Anyway, time passes rapidly in quarantine my friends. I hope a few years forward when I look back at this moment, I would not feel I wasted so much time. I don’t actually feel I made much progress through this month.

Busy in quarantine

Journal |
I update this blog less frequent than once per year, which sometimes makes me question why do I keep paying for this site. Be able to update blogs is always my pursuit, unfortunately there were always more code to write. It has been more than one year, last time I was still on how to MSAA on OpenGL 4, somehow it felt like a decade ago. The peaceful developing world took an interesting turn.

Realistic Deferred MSAA implementation

graphics |
Deferred MSAA, always has been a good problem. In the spatial anti-aliasing domain, MSAA is still the swiss-army knife, handle almost all the case. Some other post-processing methods like nvidia’s FXAA, AMDs MLAA, or DLAA. FXAA is rather pleasing in many cases as well, especially if you are a video game developer, as long as your rasterization implementation does not screwed up. But for the case like grass rendering, fur rendering, when you have many layers of thin line, FXAA will fail you.

The wayland project II

wayland Journal |
The last post I laid out the story of me with wayland. Technology is fascinating isn’t it? Every once a while, there are plenty of new projects that aim to start an revolution, getting people excited. Projects like systemd, Wayland, Vulkan make us think how come we did not think of those before, they seemed perfect at the moment. Technologies always work like a rush of hot wave, our sights are limited at the moment we are in, maybe 5 years from now, even vulkan is not sexy anymore.