24 May 2012

Weston on Android: desktop-shell

Last week I got weston-desktop-shell working on Android, along with some toytoolkit clients. This means I have Cairo androgenized, and it can even render text. I did have trouble with Cairo's configure script, so the build lacks all thread-safety. For the curious, all sources can be found via my wayland-aggregate. Right now I'm working on Android's libEGL, trying to add Wayland support.
Galaxy Nexus sideways on a table, running Weston and desktop-shell.

4 comments:

linux_RRT said...

Impressive, is the framerate increase pretty substantial?

pq said...

linux_RRT, I have no idea about framerates, nor power consumption. But I would guess that, like Wayland does, also native Android aimed to cap framerate at screen refresh rate. Framerate is not a meaningful metric here, if the system runs smoothly.

This is just first steps, nothing is optimised, and perhaps not even implemented properly. It's a proof of concept.

liam said...

Nice work!
I read your response above and realize that nothing is remotely polished but I was curious how good is the text rendering, both speed and fidelity. Skia was supposed to be extremely quick, plus they've managed to accelerate it efficiently (something Cairo is having problems with, though I realise Cairo's problems are largely due to the way it handles state), and Cairo isn't known to be a world beater when it comes to rendering times of complex objects.
Are you using pango or Android's native text handler?

pq said...

liam, thanks. The text rendering is done through Cairo, so it's whatever Cairo can do on an ARM, given the fonts its given. The fonts I think are from Android, since I have not installed any extra font packages. Cairo's configure says the only enabled font backend is "User", so I don't really know what it uses. That's why I was surprised it actually rendered fonts.

I don't much care what apps do, as long as I get them to draw something. This work is all about infrastructure, not applications.

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