from Hacker News

The Linux graphics stack in a nutshell

by zorgmonkey on 12/19/23, 9:59 PM with 94 comments

  • by userbinator on 12/20/23, 1:08 AM

    This is about 3D rendering, to be precise; I believe 2D acceleration goes through the same lower layers but the higher ones are very different.

    Incidentally, one thing I noticed when I was trying to port Linux GPU drivers to Windows some time ago is what appeared to be an excessive amount of indirection; there are so many layers and places where things could be simpler.

  • by charcircuit on 12/20/23, 2:44 AM

    The scene graph isn't part of the renderer any more than a player object that contains the player's location. The scene graph's purpose is to make updating transforms efficient. Just because it references transforms that may need to be sent to the GPU, that doesn't mean it is part of the renderer.

  • by Already__Taken on 12/20/23, 11:02 AM

    my Google Fu has failed me but isn't there a simple way to compile rust or go to a Linux os that boots to a gui? lots of embedded talks about tiny hardware and framebuffers etc. I can throw hardware around, it's UX/dx I just want ssh in the background and a UI Infront.

  • by lfmunoz4 on 12/20/23, 5:24 PM

    Could barely understand this article. Is it just me or can none explain the graphics stack in a sensible way?

  • by MBCook on 12/20/23, 2:44 AM

    Before the Wayland complaints take over the thread, I’d like to post a link to a very short thread by Drew DeVault.

    https://fosstodon.org/@drewdevault/111607882208898175

    Here are the two important posts:

    ———

    The story of Wayland:

    1. No one wanted to maintain X11 because it sucked

    2. We made Wayland and it's much better

    3. A vocal minority of change-averse people complained with little to no factual basis

    4. They were asked to muster some labor to maintain X11

    5. None of them did

    6. All of the people who actually do get work done eventually stopped listening to them and moved on with Wayland

    ——

    Some of these detractors built a tottering pile of godawful hacks on top of X11 where every piece depends on another critical design flaw of X11 and are upset that by fixing all of these design flaws their pile of hacks fell over when no one wanted to maintain the load bearing side of their hacks

  • by skullone on 12/20/23, 1:00 AM

    Is systemd going to add it's own DRI layer?