directfb.org

DirectFB

DirectFB is a thin library that provides hardware graphics acceleration, input device handling and abstraction, integrated windowing system with support for translucent windows and multiple display layers, not only on top of the Linux Framebuffer Device. It is a complete hardware abstraction layer with software fallbacks for every graphics operation that is not supported by the underlying hardware. DirectFB adds graphical power to embedded systems and sets a new standard for graphics under Linux.

2012-04-14 1.6.0 prerelease demo

Check out the demo video showing ilixi compositor and home screen with several applications!

Turn up your volume and please wait until the video has been prebuffered to achieve the best impression! (high bitrate, download)

The input events were generated by spooky (of DiVine) using this script and the C preprocessor (cpp).

This video is a live capture and has not been edited in any way!
Frames were dumped within DirectFB's X11 backend (using this patch) to tmpfs (RAM) with current timestamp, converted to fixed frame rate and encoded using ffmpeg including the brilliant Bach-Step audio track.

Look at the penguins running around 50Hz all the time even after starting all other applications!

Compositing is absolutely tearing free, applications run at the same maximum speed asynchrously synchronised with the compositor.

If you see tearing it's your video playback. Look at each frame in pause mode!

Up to ten DirectFB processes (plus spooky and bb) were running on an Intel Quad Core 3.4GHz CPU desktop (all software rendered) with 8GB of RAM to store the 4.6GB of PPM files.

You might think OK, this was running on a fast PC. Right, but it is all software rendered. So on an embedded device it should all be hardware accelerated and 1GHz CPU should be enough, even single core!

We will prove this by using Raspberry PI or other Broadcom hardware.

We've spent a lot of time to create this piece of art. The prerelease and demo images should be ready this month.

This demo runs accelerated on DirectFB supported embedded platforms. We will have it running on Mesa/DRM and Raspberry PI soon.

Feedback, ideas and help are very welcome.
Join us now!

dok

2012-04-01 Release date

The first prerelease of 1.6.0 will most likely be out by April 6th.

Update: This was no April Fool's Day joke, but after some last minute compositing enhancements we'll have it ready coming week!

dok

2012-03-23 DirectFB 1.4.16, linux-fusion 8.8.1, SaWMan 1.4.16, flux 1.2.0 release

This is a maintainance release for the DirectFB 1.4 series. It includes a lot of bugfixes and some performance improvements. There are also some secure fusion fixes, backported from the upcoming 1.6 releases.

Please find in the download section the following releases:

DirectFB 1.4.16
SaWMan 1.4.16
linux-fusion 8.8.1
flux 1.2.0

For detailed info click on the news title

andi

2012-02-12 Release schedule

The stabilization phase is still ongoing so that we expect the first release of DirectFB 1.6 in March.

dok

2012-01-11 XDirectFB

XDirectFB is back!

Thanks to Ville Syrjala for updating the port to xorg-server-1.11!

dok

2011-12-26 Raspberry Pi

This sweet little berry is a tiny computer with a Broadcom SoC that has OpenGL ES 2.0 support.
We'll be porting DirectFB to this device as soon as we got our hands on :-)
Join us!

dok

2011-11-20 ilixi developer joins team

DirectFB proudly presents the new Core Developer Tarik Sekmen.
This talented guy is one of our first employees!

He will also continue working on ilixi, his new UI engine for DirectFB.

See the new Videos section in the menu featuring a video of ilixi showing off tweens in the picture gallery!

dok

2011-11-08 Fenestra - DirectFB SDK for Windows (MSVC)

Fenestra is the new build environment for the native Win32 based DirectFB and related libraries and applications such as PluggIt that allows your desktop to be forwarded (input and output) to a TV set or other Voodoo Player.

This contains a Visual Studio Solution for building several DLLs and executables from the DirectFB and related projects, including DiVine, FusionDale, ++DFB and others.

Try and download the Fenestra snapshot, just press 'Play' after open with Visual Studio 2010 Express :)

It will show the FormsTest as on the screenshot to the right, waiting for players to become visible, connecting to one when selected, with the colored buttons for filling its screen with colors.

You can also download the binaries for a quick test.

dok

2011-09-26 DirectFB 1.4.15, linux-fusion 8.7.0, SaWMan 1.4.15, flux 1.1.0 release

These releases superseed the 1.4.14 releases which introduced a lot of new features (most notably secure-fusion), and also unfortunately many regressions. We tried to fix all known regressions with this 1.4.15 release and also backported secure-fusion fixes and feature completion from the master branch.

If you are building a project with 1.4.14 you really should update. If you are on 1.4.13 or earlier, you should know that updating to 1.4.15 changes a lot.

As we noted in our post about the new release model, 1.4.15 will be the last 1.4 release that introduces a lot of internal changes. There will be only bugfixes from now on and no API/ABI changes. Note that there could be an exception regarding the new optional resource-manager interface.

Please find in the download section the following releases:

DirectFB 1.4.15
SaWMan 1.4.15
linux-fusion 8.7.0
flux 1.1.0

For detailed info click on the news title

andi

2011-09-25 New Qt backend using DirectFBGL

Qt applications on DirectFB can utilise OpenGL now.

The merge request 1399 adds a new backend to Qt. It has all features of the old DirectFB backend, but also uses IDirectFBGL that allows the GLWidget to be used.

One interesting application of this is QML.

Thanks to Cedric Chedaleux from Orange for this contribution!

dok

2011-08-12 An important note from DirectFB.org regarding release cycles

We got a lot of negative feedback regarding our current release policy. Too many changes in minor releases, non-forseeable changes in both 1.4.x and 1.5.x branches.

We thought about that and came to the following conclusion: You are right.

So how can we solve the problem?

We decided that it is best to adopt a time-based release schedule, like many projects already did. (GNOME, Ubuntu, etc). The last three major releases will receive critical fixes, but we will try to keep the changes minimal. That way, users of DirectFB building a product can update to minor releases without the fear of breaking things or making custom changes hard to port to a new minor release.

We will also start to release -pre releases for testing, which will be open for major core and API changes.

We also plan to integrate more packages (e.g. SaWMan) into the main DirectFB tree, to make sure that each major release comes with a SaWMan that is feature-frozen and fits best.

All these measures are meant to make DirectFB releases feel more finished and easier to adopt.

So what will happen next?

The 1.4.x branch will get frozen after the 1.4.15 release but will still receive bug fixes
The next release of the 1.5.x branch will be 1.6-pre1
The release of 1.6.0 is planned for end of November 2011
1.7.0-pre will be opened with the 1.6.0 release
During the freezing phase of 1.6.0 any development would need to take place in a branch and merged into trunk when 1.7.0-pre is opened

We hope you agree to our new policy and apologise for the inconvenience caused by some volatile releases in the past.

DirectFB

2011-08-09 SaWMan 1.5.3 including stereoscopic display support, and DirectFB 1.5.3 with stereo on X11

The new SaWMan release has stereoscopic display support now!

This includes windows with stereo depth (disperity), but also allows windows to have two buffers (left and right) by themselves.

Special thanks to Broadcom for development of that extension!

There's also another DirectFB release allowing stereo output via X11, e.g. on second head to 3DTV using side-by-side output!

This works via a new runtime option, e.g. "x11-borderless=1920.0,mode=1920x1080" removing the window borders and moving the X11 window onto second head at 1920,0 and size 1920x1080.

For detailed info click on the news title

dok

2011-07-31 Secure Fusion release festival

The final major step has been made to make the new secure fusion mode stable and usable. The secure fusion mode improves safety and stability, e.g. by allowing slave applications to map shared memory readable only, requiring an IPC call to the master application for each operation that needs write access. Furthermore, object ownership is taken care of, so it is not possible for an application to run methods on another application's window, surface etc. The linux-fusion kernel module enforces permissions on a lower level, per IPC call id for example. The shared memory permissions are enforced on file system level, giving group write access to surface buffers only.

The secure fusion work has also been back ported to the 1.4.x series!

Please find in the download section the following releases:

DirectFB 1.5.2
DirectFB 1.4.14
DirectFB-examples 1.5.2
SaWMan 1.4.14 (for DirectFB 1.4.14 and 1.5.2)

Another SaWMan release (1.5.2) will follow with stereoscopic display support including windows with stereo buffers and/or disperity.

Special thanks to youview for funding the secure fusion work!

For detailed info click on the news title

dok

2011-07-29 DirectFB is hiring!

We are searching for a talented software developer for supporting various DirectFB related projects and DirectFB itself.

The candidate should have at least the following skills:

Everyday experience with Linux, preferably as your main OS
Solid C/C++ knowledge with (open-) source references
Knowledge of the key aspects of 2D graphics programming
Debugging skills (using debuggers and being creative :) )
Being a reliable team member

Experience or knowledge about one or more of the following would be much appreciated:

Software development for embedded devices
Programming 2D/3D graphics accelerators on register level
Linux kernel programming
Inter process communication
Customer relations
DirectFB :-)

You would work in a small but growing team in Berlin/Germany as a permanent employee.

If you are interested please write to jobs@directfb.org.

andi

2011-07-29 linux-fusion 8.5.1 released

This release introduces a new security model adding per entity permissions for the secure-fusion mode and will be required for the upcoming DirectFB 1.5.2 release.

It also fixes compilation problems with linux 3.x.x kernels.

Remember, that we also provide a dkms .deb package for debian-based distributions in the download section. Using the dkms package will allow your fusion module to be automagically rebuilt if you upgrade your distribution's kernel.

andi

2011-07-15 DirectFB 1.5.1 release

This is a minor feature enhancements release with extended colorkeying, special monochrome glyph rendering, color matrix, convolution filter and a pixel format with flashing bit.

For detailed info click on the news title

dok

2011-07-07 The giant DirectFB 1.5.0 release

Finally, the first release of the new DirectFB 1.5 series has arrived!

There are lots of extensions and improvements on the way to DirectFB 2.0...

At the API level we've got stereoscopic viewing support, color spaces, rendering and font extensions, enhanced OpenGL context management, utilities and a new vector graphics oriented rendering interface with a very preliminary implementation.

Under the hood there's a new secure fusion mode that is explained in this presentation. Furthermore, lots of improvements have been done to libvoodoo and libdirect, but also the software renderer which supports texture mapping now.

Still, this is only a glimpse, e.g. we also have added VDPAU, PVR2D and enhanced VNC support, as well as improved GLES 2.0 acceleration and support for building the pure Voodoo version (client libraries) with MSVC (Win32 support).

For detailed info click on the news title

dok

2011-06-29 Server up and running again

Please excuse any trouble you may have had while this server was offline due to a broken power supply yesterday.

A backup server had been in place, but DNS caches have probably given trouble to some people still.

Anyhow, we're up and running with a new power supply, also there will be a completely new hardware in a few weeks, a quad core system with 4GB of RAM :-D

dok

2011-06-22 New presentations available

There are two new presentations available. Even if they're not fully self explaining, this should not keep us from sharing them with you.

dok

2011-06-21 Secure Fusion taking off

We're following our road map and have progressed with the first step.
Slave processes map the shared memory pools (except those for pixel data) read only to increase security and safety. Any function requiring write access to meta data like object creation or manipulation, e.g. moving a window, are going via an IPC call. Those have been improved as well, just sending data back and forth without shared memory.
The penguin demo df_andi is already running!

dok

2011-06-03 DirectFB based UI toolkit project

ilixi is a new C++ UI toolkit project. It is being developed using DirectFB with embedded Linux systems in mind. There are still some widgets and features missing. Therefore, this is an opportunity for anyone who is willing to contribute and practice some DirectFB skills.

Please follow the link for further information and a demo video.

tarik

2011-05-27 DirectFB 1.4.13

This release on the API freeze branch has finally got a software texture mapping implementation!

For detailed info click on the news title

dok

2011-05-11 Announcing Project "Kleistpark" - OpenWRT based DirectFB distribution

This project is still in very early stages, but we would like to give everyone the oppurtunity to test right from the start.

Right now we created an installer which checks out OpenWRT backfire from svn, applies some patches which adds a new x86 target called "Kleistpark" and a new package feed which includes WebKitDFB and its dependencies.
We also had to include a patch to bring up DirectFB in OpenWRT to 1.4.12.

Here are the instructions to build your own Kleistpark VirtualBox image:

git clone git://git.directfb.org/git/directfb/openwrt/kleistpark
cd kleistpark/installer
./kleistpark-install.sh
cd backfire
make
(this will take a long time)

Now your resulting image will be in bin/x86/openwrt-x86-kleistpark-combined-ext2.vdi

You have to create a VM with an emulated serial port, and with an IDE controller, or else it wont boot

After booting you have to use udhcpc if you want an IP from your DHCP server. After that try starting WebKitDFB which should bring you to http://directfb.org in an instant :)

andi