A Guide To Hacking With EGL & KMS

Written by Michael Larabel in Linux Kernel on 1 November 2011 at 09:29 AM EDT. 2 Comments
LINUX KERNEL
There's long been a desire to have a KMS-based console program that can tie in with OpenGL, but none of the active DRM developers have yet to get around to writing such a "kmscon" program. However, Jesse Barnes has written a fairly in-depth guide for anyone wishing to write a standalone program using EGL and KMS with OpenGL. As Jesse says, "just in case anyone wants to port the VTE widget and give me my VTs on a cube."

In this blog post is where the well-known Intel OSTC developer goes over writing a simple KMS/EGL application, complete with code snippets. This is using EGL/OpenGL and KMS without any X.Org Server (or any display server like Wayland) in between the program and the hardware.

Jesse's hacking guide goes over initializing the DRI device, setting up the Generic Buffer Management library, prepping EGL (not GLX), dealing with KMS output handling, create an OpenGL context for drawing, and rendering the standard OpenGL calls. It's fairly simple for anyone with basic OpenGL experience.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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