Valve

Tue, 14 Mar 2017 12:10:17 -0700
tags/fdo

Consulting for Valve in my spare time

Valve Software has asked me to help work on a couple of Linux graphics issues, so I'll be doing a bit of consulting for them in my spare time. It should be an interesting diversion from my day job working for Hewlett Packard Enterprise on Memory Driven Computing and other fun things.

First thing on my plate is helping support head-mounted displays better by getting the window system out of the way. I spent some time talking with Dave Airlie and Eric Anholt about how this might work and have started on the kernel side of that. A brief synopsis is that we'll split off some of the output resources from the window system and hand them to the HMD compositor to perform mode setting and page flips.

After that, I'll be working out how to improve frame timing reporting back to games from a composited desktop under X. Right now, a game running on X with a compositing manager can't tell when each frame was shown, nor accurately predict when a new frame will be shown. This makes smooth animation rather difficult.