ubuntu-phone team mailing list archive

[Alan Griffiths <alan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 27/04/16 15:37, Alan Bell wrote:
> when looking to move to Unity8 on the desktop I am *really* going to
> miss my cube and zoom and of course the wobbly windows. As I
> understand it Mir is OpenGL (or OpenGL ES or something) based so
> everything goes through the powerful part of the GPU anyway, what are
> the prospects of manipulating the surfaces on the way through? Is this
> something that would be built in to the Mir compositor or could it be
> a third party thing? I see the alt-tab switcher is kinda 3dish (is
> that real 3d or just QML doing it in 2d with the CPU?) but I am not
> seeing any other bit of the phone interface taking advantage of the
> capability of the GPU. 

It is a complex story that will take time to play out.

Mir and Unity8 are separate things being developed together and have
different roles in this.

Mir has a lot of options for configuring the way things are done and
custom compositing is definitely possible by the calling code.
Currently, there's no mechanism /in Mir/ for configuring this at
runtime. But mir_demo_server has a "custom-compositor" configuration
option that allows a choice of compositors built into the binary (and it
would be feasible to extend this approach to dynamically load
compositing code). Some of the other mir-demos also customize
compositing (e.g. mir_proving_server).

Unity8 configures Mir so that it can do much of the compositing using Qt
- an approach that would complicate any other customization of
compositing using Mir. I'm not aware of any work to provide pluggable
composting options to Unity8.

It is all feasible but, for developers working for Canonical it must
take second place to getting the base experience working well.

-- 
Alan Griffiths  +44 (0)798 9938 758
Octopull Ltd    http://www.octopull.co.uk/