Up and running

Today I managed to get the basic color conversion step up and running using SoftPipe. Most of the difficulty came in understanding Gallium more than implementing the color conversion stuff. I spent many hours trying to figure out why I couldn't get any geometry to show up in my window. Copying surfaces to the frame buffer worked fine, but rendering a triangle left me staring at a black screen. It turns out that you have to set the pipe_blend_state.colormask bits for the channels you want to write to. First, I didn't even consider that state because I disabled blending. Second, setting the mask to allow writes was the opposite of what I would assume. It took several hours of stepping through Gallium to find that everything was OK until we got to the fragment shader, where it skipped the frame buffer write back.

Other issues included getting a handle on writing TGSI shader code and figuring out how to get Gallium and XvMC APIs to agree. At the moment generating TGSI isn't a pretty process, you can look in gallium/auxiliary/util/u_simple_shaders.c for an example. As for Gallium and XvMC agreeing, most of the problem came from the fact that XvMC functions all accept a Display*. What do you do if the client creates an XvMC context with one Display*, creates a surface with another Display*, and so on? Well, hopefully no one will do that, but one has to wonder why it's even allowed. Then there's the issue of some calls only taking an XvMCSurface*, and not the associated context. Unfortunately the context is where I keep the Gallium pipe context, so every surface has to have a reference to the context it was created with. Luckily this works out since some functions that do take a surface and context require that we check that they match, so at least it makes that simple.