Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH] opengl rendering in the sdl window

[Stefano Stabellini]

Anthony Liguori wrote:

 > This is neat, but, I'm unsure if the right way to support OpenGL is
> through SDL.  For instance, there were Cocoa OpenGL patches posted a bit
> ago that would be largely similar.  It may make more sense to have an
> OpenGL front-end that has conditional code for SDL/Cocoa/X/etc.
> 
> Then again, I've been kicking around the idea of doing a GTK front-end. 
> An obvious thing to do here would be a glext based OpenGL version (as we
> do in gtk-vnc).


I don't think GTK support would add much to what qemu already has (aside
from more dependencies :).

 
> I think we need to have some discussion about what the long term
> front-end should be for QEMU.  Otherwise, we're going to end up with a
> proliferation of front-ends.  Personally, I'd rather move from SDL to
> GTK so that we can build a proper user interface.
> 

While decoupling the opengl code from the sdl code seems a good idea, in
 practice opengl is only for rendering and the sdl code handles so much
more than that.
Opengl depends heavily on SDL for everything else, so separating the two
of them may not be straightforward.

If you really want to go this route, probably the simplest way is to
treat opengl as a separate drop in reandering replacement for sdl (or
whatever other future frontend).
Opengl would substitute only few critical rendering related functions
(sdl_resize_shared, sdl_colourdepth, sdl_update, sdl_setdata).