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by woahhvicky 3160 days ago
There should probably be a user space layer that abstracts over direct kernel graphics APIs. There’s no reason GPM vs EGLStreams shouldn’t be an implementation detail.

Another note, a window manager author shouldn’t have to deal with these sorts of issues. Puts into question the “wayland way.” I guess this is what wlc and wlroots are for but seems like those approaches have flaws given there was a need for wlroots to even exist in the first place.
2 comments
ascent12 3160 days ago
GBM already IS a userspace layer than abstracts over driver-specific kernel interfaces. That's the whole point.

You also seem to have missed the whole point of wayland's design. There is no separation between "window managers" and "display servers"; there are just "compositors". So naturally it is something that needs to be dealt with. wlc, libweston, wlroots (for which I am an author, responsible for the DRM/GBM code), etc., are designed to make it easier to write compositors and allow for more code reuse. So yes, someone using one of these libraries wouldn't need to deal with these details, but we're actually writing such a library.

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badsectoracula 3160 days ago
> You also seem to have missed the whole point of wayland's design. There is no separation between "window managers" and "display servers"; there are just "compositors".

I think the point is that this design is bad.

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digi_owl 3160 days ago
How about we call this abstraction layer X for the time being?
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