Keith Packard Plumbs Direct Display Extensions Into RADV & ANV

Written by Michael Larabel in Valve on 10 February 2018 at 07:44 AM EST. 6 Comments
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As part of his ongoing contract work for improving virtual reality head-mounted display (VR HMD) support on the Linux desktop, now that his DRM leasing and other X.Org Server / kernel level work is getting in order, Keith Packard sent out a set of patches implementing direct display extensions for Mesa's Radeon RADV and Intel ANV Vulkan drivers.

These direct display extensions are for allowing Vulkan to display content on an output directly either through the Direct Rendering Manager without any windowing system or through RandR and Linux DRM leases. The primary use-case here is for VR HMDs with trying to get them out of the way of any Linux desktop compositor and allowing SteamVR's compositor to deal with the head-mounted display directly for most control and eliminating any possible inefficiencies.

The code added to Mesa for the ANV/RADV Vulkan drivers implement KHR_display_extension, EXT_direct_mode_display, EXT_acquire_xlib_display, EXT_display_surface_counter, EXT_display_control, VK_MESA_query_timestamp, and VK_GOOGLE_display_timing extensions.

The seven patches for now can be found on dri-devel but hopefully we will see all of this work tidied up in time for the Mesa 18.1 release next quarter.
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