Graphics Overview

This article will give an overview of how graphics are generated on a rockchip platform.

Graphics with X11

Xserver is the display system used on regular desktop Linux platforms.

Rockchip have a custom Xserver which have enable glamor 2D acceleration.

Xserver usually have a good compatibility, but the performance may be little less and its size is more large than other display system.

Gstreamer X11 sink have DRM 4k-Video render support(though hacky).

Weston is the reference implementation of a Wayland compositor, and a
useful compositor in its own right.

Rockchip don't do much develop in wayland at current, but wetson are tested that can run in rk3288 and rk3399.

If you don't want to use X11 or wayland, there are some chooses for you.

Interface:
Libdrm and libmali-gbm can be used to draw UI without display systems.

Framework:
QT can work without x11 or wayland, it run Qt5 applications on top of EGL(libmali-gbm).
WIth qt eglfs, video player can reach 1080-60fps.

Test platform: rk3288

backend	off-screen	on-screen	DMA-Buf
X11			support
Wayland			support
gbm			support
fbdev	untested	untested	unsupport

For details of the full Linux graphics stack, please refer to online documents in Freedesktop, ARM, Arch wiki…..