Gallium3D Gets A Heads-Up Display For Information

The latest accomplishment of Marek Olšák is developing a "heads-up display" for Gallium3D DRI2 drivers for showing off various attributes of the current system state like the frame-rate and CPU load.

Marek developed a new Gallium3D module to draw transparent graphs and data on top of whatever OpenGL applications are running. This allows an overlay of system vitals like the frame-rate, CPU load, number of pixels rendered, and other interesting technical information over any application. The work also allows for drivers to expose driver-specific information too.

Showing this Gallium3D HUD with a patched version of Mesa is as easy as setting values for the GALLIUM_HUD environment variable. "So basically I'd like to be able to display as much useful info in the HUD as possible. We should definitely add some ioctls for querying useful stats from the kernel DRM/TTM and be able to see in real time what happens in Mesa and the kernel. It's pretty easy - just expose a new query through the gallium interface and the HUD will automatically pick it up."

The Gallium3D Heads-Up Display (HUD) was published by Marek on Friday and currently consists of five patches on the Mesa mailing list. Here's what this new Gallium3D feature looks like: