DirectFB Is Still Working On EGL United, Looking Forward To Vulkan

Written by Michael Larabel in Free Software on 5 November 2016 at 01:09 PM EDT. 2 Comments
FREE SOFTWARE
After writing earlier this week about DirectFB returning online after their project site disappeared, the lead developer has put out an update on the project.

Since writing that post on Thursday, a "DirectFB returns" message was posted to their new site at DirectFB.net.

The message explains that the site disappeared after the server fees weren't paid and the old domain ended up getting lost too. But now he's finally restored service and setup shop at the DirectFB.net domain. The commercial projects around DirectFB also dried up in 2015.

In terms of work on the code, work had been underway on DirectFB 1.8 and was working on "EGL United", to support the EGI API with different windowing system types. The post explained, "For example, it is possible to just use the EGL United implementation of libEGL with an X11 binary and have it render into a DirectFB window. Same for Wayland integration. Most interesting is the Mesa implementation with DRM buffer management, or the EGLImage support using IDirectFBSurface. Somehow, I didn't finish EGL United, especially the X11 support was not fully working."

Now with the Vulkan API being around, DirectFB development is hopeful around it with "a lot more opportunity in the area of the Task Manager, which makes multi-threaded use of the graphics system (bad for OpenGL) and runs command buffer oriented. I guess there's a lot of work to be done in the future to have DirectFB run with Vulkan."

Hopefully we'll see DirectFB with Vulkan in the not too distant future!
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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