Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH] Add QEMU DirectFB display driver

[Stefano Stabellini]

On Tue, 18 May 2010, Kevin Wolf wrote:
> Am 17.05.2010 23:43, schrieb Anthony Liguori:
> > On 05/17/2010 04:35 PM, malc wrote:
> >> There's one thing that SDL does marvelously well - it's just one fairly
> >> small and self contained library that doesn't unleash dependency hell on
> >> the user.
> >>    
> >>> The fact that we have cocoa support in the tree is basically an admission 
> >>> of
> >>> failure with SDL.
> >>>      
> >> I don't think so, the way i see it: someone had an itch (i.e. an
> >> application that does not integrate well with his windowing environment)
> >> and he scratched it.
> >>    
> > 
> > SDL doesn't integrate well into a modern Gnome desktop either.  I don't 
> > see why we have Cocoa and not Gtk.  If the answer is, someone needs to 
> > send patches, expect patches soon :-)
> 
> So with this argument, we'll not only get a GTK backend, but Qt and
> Windows backends, too? But then you can't reasonably say any more that
> DirectFB would be too much additional code to maintain.
 
My personal opinion is that SDL does a decent job at rendering a window
in a X11 environment, but given the current SDL limitation with
directfb, we need another output mechanism to cover that case, so that
we can have multiple guests fullscreen on different host virtual
terminals. This is an important use case for embedded environments.

I don't think GTK or Qt would add much to what SDL already offers,
unless we want to develop our own management GUI for qemu, but I don't
think is a very good idea.
I think it would be better to implement an accelerated frontend for
rendering the framebuffer, like opengl or xv.