Trying to tackle the screen rotation issue, where to start?

[cjxgm]

Actually, I’ve already investigated a bit and tried to do a software rotation in HWInterface:

switch (frontBuffer->ColorSpace()) {
		case B_RGB32:
		case B_RGBA32:
		{
			#if 0
			int32 bytes = (right - x + 1) * 4;

			if (bytes > 0) {
				// offset to left top pixel in dest buffer
				dst += y * dstBPR + x * 4;
				// copy
				for (; y <= bottom; y++) {
					// bytes is guaranteed to be multiple of 4
					memcpy(dst, src, bytes);
					dst += dstBPR;
					src += srcBPR;
				}
			}
			#else
			int32 src_width = right - x + 1;
			int32 src_height = bottom - y + 1;
			int32 dst_width = frontBuffer->Width();
			int32 dst_height = frontBuffer->Height();
			for (int32 ysrc = 0; ysrc < src_height; ysrc++) {
				for (int32 xsrc = 0; xsrc < src_width; xsrc++) {
					int32 ydst = x + xsrc;
					int32 xdst = dst_width - (y + ysrc);
					if (ydst < 0) continue;
					if (xdst < 0) continue;
					if (ydst >= dst_height) continue;
					if (xdst >= dst_width) continue;

					uint8* psrc = src + ysrc * srcBPR + xsrc * 4;
					uint8* pdst = dst + ydst * dstBPR + xdst * 4;
					memcpy(pdst, psrc, 4);
				}
			}
			#endif
			break;
		}
    ...

Which give me this:

Well, this is expected, since I didn’t report the rotated size, but how do I do that?
I’ve tried to modify DrawingBuffer() to return a wrapped backbuffer, which reports rotated size. But it results in crashes. And I do not think this is a proper way to fix this. What does the drawing engine use to determine the dimension of the canvas? By video mode or by the backbuffer’s width and height?

But, even if that can be done, I do not like the current method for rotation. For a proper screen rotation support, I would consider something that handles all of these:

• Some video driver may support rotation (by modesetting?) natively (e.g. for Intel drivers, I found that some registers has a description like this “PRI_CTL_[A-C]: Enable/Disable the panel, gamma mode, pixel format, tiling, rotation”, but I’m no driver guy so not sure about it). If so, no software rotation should be done.
• Hardware cursors.
• Single-buffered apps.
• Direct output? I’m not sure what it is called. But I assume that hardware accelerated OpenGL writes directly to screen in the hardware, just like hardware cursors.

Then, we have to

• Expose the rotation settings throughout all relavent components.
• Add GUI in screen preferences to adjust it.
• React dynamically to user’s adjustment.

And maybe off topic, how do I speed up my edit-run-test cycle? Everytime I ran jam, it has to build my changes (which is fast) and build a new image (which is slow), then I can qemu the new image for testing. Is there any way to build a single component (e.g. just build app_server) and insert it to the raw image, without rebuilding the image from scratch?

BTW I’m working on r1beta4 because the master branch failed to build.

[KitsunePrefecture]

That’s I call it : “playing with Haiku” !
(LOL)
well determined- you may invent multimonitor support finally if you do not watch yourself carefullly !..

[cjxgm]

@cjxgm

By video mode or by the backbuffer’s width and height?

I’m afraid Haiku does the worst: It uses both! and may be more

• The drawing code uses dimensions from framwbuffer. Some APIs get the size from front buffer, some get the size from the passed in buffer, which is, sometimes the back buffer.
• Other parts (like the Desktop) get dimensions from Screen, which in turn gets the size from video mode.

There are so many size-related getter functions even in a single class.
I’m afraid there is no easy way to hack in a rotated size. It has to be done the hard way.

[cjxgm]

Guess what, I do hacked in those rotated sizes!

And as expected, direct framebuffer write like OpenGL will be displayed at wrong position in wrong rotation.

Finally, proper screen rotation on GPD Pocket!

This is just a beginning though. I’m sure current hack won’t be merged upstream.

[PulkoMandy]

@cjxgm

And maybe off topic, how do I speed up my edit-run-test cycle? Everytime I ran jam, it has to build my changes (which is fast) and build a new image (which is slow), then I can qemu the new image for testing. Is there any way to build a single component (e.g. just build app_server) and insert it to the raw image, without rebuilding the image from scratch?

The simplest way and already much jaster is to jam only haiku.hpkg (jam -qj8 haiku.hpkg for example) and use pkgman install to install that into your running system (using pkgman install).

Another option, if you compile from Haiku, is to use jam @install, which will directly put the files into an existing mounted BFS partition. If you build from Linux, you can use jam @update, if that still works, it will only replace the updated files in the built image.

@cjxgm

Some video driver may support rotation (by modesetting?) natively (e.g. for Intel drivers, I found that some registers has a description like this “PRI_CTL_[A-C]: Enable/Disable the panel, gamma mode, pixel format, tiling, rotation”, but I’m no driver guy so not sure about it). If so, no software rotation should be done.

That would be nice, but since not all hardware may support it, I think we will still need a software fallback for the drivers which don’t.

@cjxgm

Direct output? I’m not sure what it is called. But I assume that hardware accelerated OpenGL writes directly to screen in the hardware, just like hardware cursors.

Not really. Hardware cursors are completely handled by the hardware and so they are never really “written” anywhere.

OpenGL in its current implementation is full software rendering and renders to the screen buffer.

So, it depends when you do the rotation: when drawing into the backbuffer, or when copying the backbuffer into the frontbuffer. The place where it will matter is everything using BDirectWindow, which allows apps to directly write the backbuffer.

There are also questions about LCD subpixel antialiasing, which needs to be done in a different direction.

@cjxgm

This is just a beginning though. I’m sure current hack won’t be merged upstream.

Who knows? We can start from what you have and improve it later. as long as it doesn’t require changing every app to take the screen rotation into account, I think it’s fine?

[waddlesplash]

@PulkoMandy

There are also questions about LCD subpixel antialiasing, which needs to be done in a different direction.

Precisely.

I was looking into this before along with multimonitor support, and I think the way to solve both problems at once is to introduce a MultiplexingHWInterface (probably we should rename HWInterface… but I digress) which could take draw calls and decide to what screen they should be sent to, presenting a series of screens as one big virtual screen. As transforms would have to be applied before sending the drawcall, adding a “rotate” transform for rotated screens wouldn’t be difficult at all.

[cjxgm]

I wonder how would this even work.

Maybe X11 protocol Xinerama / RandR could give us some hint.

[waddlesplash]

HiDPI scaling across screens is a tricky problem, and the various approaches to it have been discussed before, but they do need to be taken into account when designing an interface here, yes.

[SantiagoLema]

I know it’s been a few months since the last post here. Has anything changed on this software rotation front ?

I think I’d be happy like many to have a basic software rotation in settings even if it’s slow or doesn’t work with multiple monitors. It could be in a “dev hacks” section not to confuse newcomers.

It would be very useful notably when testing other issues as doing anything with a rotated screen feels so uncomfortable it discourages you to even try other features such as WiFi settings etc.

There seems to be a bunch of cheap N100 Chinese laptops out here that come with a rotated screen (even the bios is in the wrong direction) . I have one (a TopTon p8 which is sort of a poor man’s GPD pocket).

[cb88]

Lenovo Legion GO is another device guilty of this from a big player like Lenovo even.

It’s also an issue if you have a LCD with rotation support (a coworker had one of these he’d rotate to so he could view more code vertically for instance).