The Linux Graphics Stack

 

The Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) is a device-independent kernel-level device driver that provides support for the Direct Rendering Infrastructure.

 

Direct Rendering Infrastructure (DRI) is an interface and a free software implementation inside the kernel used by the X Window System/Wayland to securely allow user applications to access the video hardware without requiring data to be passed through the display server. Its primary application is to provide hardware acceleration for the Mesa implementation of OpenGL, which is the core of the DRI OpenGL drivers. Without DRI, programs have to use the CPU while rendering (indirect rendering), which degrades overall performance. DRI has also been adapted to provide OpenGL acceleration on a framebuffer console without a display server running.

 

Mode setting (KMS) is a software operation that activates a display mode (screen resolution, color depth, and refresh rate) for a computer's display adapter.

 

Wayland is a protocol that specifies the communication between the display server (called Wayland compositor) and its clients. It was initially designed as a replacement for the X Window System. In stark contrast to the latter, Wayland clients will render without detour directly into their own buffer located in the graphics memory, through the use of EGL with some additional Wayland-specific extensions to EGL. The display manager is to do the compositing, hence it will incorporate a big chunk of the functionality of current-day compositing window managers. It will composite those buffers to form the on-screen display of application windows. The Wayland protocol is essentially only about input handling and buffer management. The handling of the input hardware relies on evdev in Linux, and similar components in other operating systems.

 

EGL is an interface between Khronos rendering APIs (such as OpenGL, OpenGL ES or OpenVG) and the underlying native platform windowing system. EGL handles graphics context management, surface/buffer binding, rendering synchronization, and enables "high-performance, accelerated, mixed-mode 2D and 3D rendering using other Khronos APIs." EGL is managed by the non-profit technology consortium Khronos Group.

 

evdev (for event device) is a component of the Linux kernel for handling input (from keyboards, mice, joysticks, etc.) and a closely related input driver for both the X.Org Server and Wayland compositors. The kernel component is glue code which translates input events from peripheral-specific drivers into a generic structure which the input driver can easily translate into X11 events. Thus every input device with a Linux driver is compatible with the X.Org input driver, making X.Org much easier to configure.

 

Mesa is a collection of free and open-source libraries that implement OpenGL and several other APIs related to hardware-accelerated 3D rendering, 3D computer graphics and GPGPU.

 

Reference

• http://django-notes.blogspot.kr/2014/04/the-linux-graphics-stack.html
• http://blog.mecheye.net/2012/06/the-linux-graphics-stack/