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  • Anthony Liguori's avatar
    DisplayAllocator interface (Stefano Stabellini) · 7b5d76da
    Anthony Liguori authored
    
    
    Hi all,
    this patch adds a DisplayAllocator interface that allows display
    frontends (sdl in particular) to provide a preallocated display buffer
    for the graphical backend to use.
    
    Whenever a graphical backend cannot use
    qemu_create_displaysurface_from because its own internal pixel format
    cannot be exported directly (text mode or graphical mode with color
    depth 8 or 24), it creates another display buffer in memory using
    qemu_create_displaysurface and does the conversion.
    This new buffer needs to be blitted into the sdl surface buffer every time
    we need to update portions of the screen.
    We can avoid this using the DisplayAllocator interace: sdl provides its
    own implementation of qemu_create_displaysurface, giving back the sdl
    surface buffer directly (as we used to do before the DisplayState
    changes).
    Since the buffer returned by sdl could be in bgr format we need to put
    back in the handlers of that case.
    
    This approach is good if the two following conditions are true:
    
    1) the sdl surface is a software surface that resides in main memory;
    
    2) the host display color depth is either 16 or 32 bpp.
    
    If first condition is false we can have bad performances using sdl
    and vnc together.
    If the second condition is false performances are certainly not going to
    improve but they shouldn't get worse either.
    
    The first condition is always true, at least on linux/X11 systems; but I
    believe is true also on other platforms.
    The second condition is true in the vast majority of the cases.
    
    This patch should also have the good side effect of solving the sdl
    2D slowness malc was reporting on MacOS, because SDL_BlitSurface is not
    going to be called anymore when the guest is in text mode or 24bpp.
    However the root problem is still present so I suspect we may
    still see some slowness on MacOS when the guest is in 32 or 16 bpp.
    
    Signed-off-by: default avatarStefano Stabellini <stefano.stabellini@eu.citrix.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarAnthony Liguori <aliguori@us.ibm.com>
    
    
    git-svn-id: svn://svn.savannah.nongnu.org/qemu/trunk@6839 c046a42c-6fe2-441c-8c8c-71466251a162
    7b5d76da