Why Linux's Direct Rendering Manager Won't Add A Generic 2D Acceleration API

Daniel Vetter of Intel's Open-Source Technology Center team has written his first blog post in a while on Linux graphics. In this latest post he is answering why there isn't a 2D user-space API in the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) code.

While Linux DRM has advanced on many fronts in the past few years, it doesn't offer any generic 2D acceleration API. The reasons for that come down to there being no 2D acceleration standard akin to OpenGL/Vulkan for 3D (granted, there's OpenVG for vector graphics and some other limited alternatives, but nothing as dominant), each hardware blitter engine being different, and other complexities that make 2D acceleration harder than one might otherwise think.

But there does exist 2D rendering bits within the KMS user-space API. Of course, there is also GLAMOR if bringing up an X/XWayland environment for getting 2D accelerated over OpenGL. GLAMOR has got into decent shape the past few years and is quite performant on X.Org Server 1.19~1.20.

Anyhow, to read Daniel's thoughts on the 2D acceleration API for DRM topic, this morning's read can be found at blog.ffwll.ch.