Leasing Support Revised For X.Org Server / RADV, For SteamVR On Linux

Written by Michael Larabel in Valve on 2 August 2017 at 08:19 AM EDT. 1 Comment
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Keith Packard who has been working on some low-level driver/X improvements for SteamVR on Linux on contract for Valve has published updated patches.

His latest area in particular has been for supporting DRM leases to let the SteamVR compositor take control of VR head mounted displays (HMDs) without the window manager getting in the way or other interferences. This has resulted in changes to the X.Org Server, RandR 1.6, and more.

Coming out this morning are updated xserver patches that is now implemented in a simpler form for creating/destroying leases and receiving events.

There's also the latest RandR patches.

And most notably is Keith now adding the leasing support for RADV. The RADV support includes introducing the VK_KHR_display, VK_KEITHP_kms_display, and VK_EXT_direct_mode_display. The tentative VK_KEITHP_kms_display extension for Vulkan allows an application to provide a master file descriptor which is used instead of opening its own device. The EXT_acquire_xlib_display extension matches an API offered by NVIDIA's Linux driver for SteamVR support but implements the new X leases interface. His patches also add VK_EXT_display_control support to RADV for providing fences and frame count data.

Hopefully we'll see Keith's work come together in time for Mesa 17.3 and then once all the X patches land, hopefully he'll take to finally organizing the xorg-server 1.20 release.
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