David Herrmann - Graphics beyond the main compositor

Abstract

Most of the graphics development is targeted at the main session compositor. This is reasonable, as it is the interface that is used by far the greatest part of the time. However, there is a lot of interesting development going on beyond the main desktop environments, including boot-loader graphics, initrd UIs, emergency terminals and late-shutdown screens. While the graphical demands in those situations are rather low, we have to deal with a different, unique set of problems: accessing graphics via generic drivers, smooth transition to a full-featured driver, reducing memory footprint and loading-time to a minimum, claiming resources in emergency-situations and more.

A lot of work has already been done to solve these problems, but challenges keep coming it. As only very few people actively work on those problems, this talk will walk through the different projects, describe the challenges and what future work is being planned. Eventually, our goal is to reduce moments off the main session to a minimum, make them as unobtrusive as possible and smoothly integrate into the different desktop environments.

Slides Video (no sound for the first two minutes, sorry)