TI Shows Off Impressive, Experimental Wayland Demo

Rob Clark of Texas Instruments presented on the second day of this year's GStreamer Conference where he talked about GStreamer for the TI OMAP4, DMA-BUF, DRI2Video, and other low-level Linux multimedia work he's engaged in along with work on TI's OMAP Linux graphics driver. Rob ended up showing off an impressive but experimental demo of video playback work he's doing with Wayland.

For the first part of his GStreamer 2012 Conference presentation, Rob Clark was just talking about the usual GStreamer (obviously), DMA-BUF, and OMAP4 topics before getting to Wayland. About Wayland, he says, "Wayland is very nice...It simplifies a lot of things that are difficult to use in X, such as overlays. With Wayland we can push YUV buffers directly to the server."

Rob Clark at Texas Instruments has been working on GStreamer + DMA-BUF support over Wayland while running from TI's low-powered OMAP4 PandaBoard ARM development board. The Texas Instruments developer, who's also working on the Freedreno driver in his spare time as a reverse-engineered open-source Qualcomm graphics driver, has experienced much success with Wayland and video playback.

Days ago Rob Clark posted shader optimizations to greatly speed-up Weston. Rob's patches optimized Weston's shaders to allow pushing YUV buffers for hardware-accelerated decode of 1080p videos to be multiple times faster and also moving around windows in Wayland is multiple times faster. When posting these patches he mentioned that Wayland/Weston is now much more usable on low-powered ARM platforms on hardware like the OMAP4 PandaBoard.

Rob's demo today to showcase the GStreamer + OMAP4460 + DMA-BUF work was done from a Wayland/Weston build with his shader optimization work and other video playback improvements. From there he was able to show that 1080p video playback is possible to be done in a fluid manner with Wayland from the PandaBoard, which is powered by a dual-core 1.2GHz Cortex-A9 SoC. Video playback was smooth and other Wayland/Weston features could be used concurrently like rotating the window and other Weston effects.

As exclusively shared yesterday, I said that there would be an interesting Wayland demo from a new graphics driver on Tuesday. In talking with Rob Clark, he hopes to release this TI OMAP4 driver support under an "experimental" state in the near future. Supporting Wayland on the OMAP4 isn't much of a stress since they do have their mainline OMAP DRM driver that handles kernel mode-setting (KMS) along with GEM memory management, but their 3D support provided by the Imagination PowerVR SGX is still a closed-up blob. Embedded below is a video I quickly recorded showing off the smooth playback of video under Wayland with the Weston compositor from the PandaBoard thanks to the work of Texas Instruments.