Early-Stage DirectFB For Android Devices

There's emerging support within the DirectFB project for running atop Google's Android platform.

When checking whether or not DirectFB 1.6 is released yet with its many new features, which was slated to happen in January, I discovered some interesting activity within the main Git repository for this lightweight graphics acceleration (and input, among other features) library. Landing in the DirectFB code-base in the past two weeks since last writing about the project has been early-stage Android support.

For Android 2.3.3 and later, there is now early DirectFB support with a default window manager, GLES2 graphics driver, and support for EGL context creation. The code is still early-on within the DirectFB code-base, but it may prove to be interesting in the end.

A previous attempt to bring DirectFB to Android happened in 2010 with the SourceForge-based android-dfb project, but it appears to now be a dormant project.

Meanwhile, DirectFB 1.6 hasn't been released yet but there's been other work going on within the main DirectFB GIt repository as recently as two days ago, aside from this Android enablement. The Git repository can be dug through here.

Other DirectFB news this month is that XDirectFB has been brought back to be made compatible with X.Org Server 1.11. XDirectFB is a rootless X11 Server using DirectFB windows for X11 top-level windows.