fbturbo.man

.\" shorthand for double quote that works everywhere.
.ds q \N'34'
.TH FBTURBO __drivermansuffix__ __vendorversion__
.SH NAME
fbturbo \- video driver for Allwinner and other ARM-based devices
.SH SYNOPSIS
.nf
.B "Section \*qDevice\*q"
.BI "  Identifier \*q"  devname \*q
.B  "  Driver \*qfbturbo\*q"
\ \ ...
.B EndSection
.fi
.SH DESCRIPTION
.B fbturbo
is an __xservername__ driver for Allwinner and other ARM-based devices,
derived from
.B fbdev
driver.
With regard to 2D graphics, it provides a number of software optimizations
on all platforms, while letting the SIMD (ARM NEON) accelerated code from the
.B pixman
library run at full speed without any unnecessary overhead. 2D hardware
acceleration using G2D is supported on sunxi platforms. The recommended
framebuffer color depths are 16 (RGB565) and 24 (XRGB8888), the other color
depths may be supported too. Multi-head configurations are supported.
.SH SUPPORTED HARDWARE
The 
.B fbturbo
driver supports all hardware where a framebuffer driver is available and
uses the os-specific submodule fbdevhw(__drivermansuffix__) to talk
to the kernel
device driver.  Currently a fbdevhw module is available for linux.
Additionally it is intended to use some of the display controller features
from Allwinner A10/A13 SoC and provide the necessary DRI2 integration with
the proprietary OpenGL ES binary blobs for Mali400 GPU (if they are installed
in the system). The part related to Mali400 GPU support is derived from
the vendor provided open source
.B xf86-video-mali
driver.
.SH CONFIGURATION DETAILS
Please refer to __xconfigfile__(__filemansuffix__) for general configuration
details.  This section only covers configuration details specific to
this driver.
.PP
For this driver it is not required to specify modes in the screen 
section of the config file.  The
.B fbturbo
driver can pick up the currently used video mode from the framebuffer 
driver and will use it if there are no video modes configured.
.PP
The following driver 
.B Options
are supported:
.TP
.BI "Option \*qfbdev\*q \*q" string \*q
The framebuffer device to use. Default: /dev/fb0.
.TP
.BI "Option \*qShadowFB\*q \*q" boolean \*q
Enable or disable use of the shadow framebuffer layer.  Default: off on
most platforms (any hardware that supports NEON, VFP, or 2D hardware
acceleration).
.TP
.BI "Option \*qRotate\*q \*q" string \*q
Enable rotation of the display. The supported values are "CW" (clockwise,
90 degrees), "UD" (upside down, 180 degrees) and "CCW" (counter clockwise,
270 degrees). Implies use of the shadow framebuffer layer.   Default: off.
.TP
.BI "Option \*qUseBackingStore\*q \*q" boolean \*q
Enable the use of backing store for certain windows at the bottom of the
stacking order. This allows to avoid expensive redraws caused by expose
events when dragging one window on top of another. The default heuristics
tries to be "smart" and avoid backing store allocation for the active
window which has keyboard focus. The purpose is to get the best balance
between performance and memory footprint without introducing full
compositing overhead. Default: inverse of ShadowFB
.TP
.BI "Option \*qForceBackingStore\*q \*q" boolean \*q
Same as "UseBackingStore" option, but don't apply any heuristics and just
allocate backing store for all windows.
.TP
.BI "Option \*qHWCursor\*q \*q" boolean \*q
Enable or disable the HW cursor.  Supported on sunxi platforms. Default: on
if supported, off otherwise.
.TP
.BI "Option \*qDRI2\*q \*q" boolean \*q
Enable or disable DRI2 integration for Mali GPU. Provides hardware
accelerated OpenGL ES in the case if proprietary blob libMali.so
is installed in the system and linux kernel provides modules mali.ko,
mali_drm.ko and ump.ko with compatible version (for example, both kernel
modules and libMali.so can have revision r3p0).  Default: on.
.TP
.BI "Option \*qDRI2HWOverlay\*q \*q" boolean \*q
Enable the use of display controller hardware overlays (aka "layers",
"windows", ...) for fully visible DRI2 backed OpenGL ES windows in order
to avoid expensive memory copy operations. That's a zero-copy solution
which eliminates unnecessary CPU overhead.  Default: on.

.B Note:
the hardware overlays are automatically disabled in the case if a
compositing window manager (xfwm4, kwin, ...) is used for various
fancy desktop effects such as windows translucency or shadows. Maybe
some improvements are possible in this area. But if you really care
about the desktop performance, then you likely don't want to enable
any compositing effects in your window manager anyway.
.TP
.BI "Option \*qSwapbuffersWait\*q \*q" boolean \*q
This option controls the behavior of eglSwapBuffers calls by OpenGL ES
applications. If enabled, the calls will try to avoid tearing by making
sure the display scanline is outside of the area to be copied before the
copy occurs. If disabled, no scanline synchronization is performed,
meaning tearing will likely occur. Note that when enabled, this option
can adversely affect the framerate of applications that render frames
at less than refresh rate.  Default: enabled.
.TP
.BI "Option \*qAccelMethod\*q \*q" "string" \*q
Chooses between available acceleration architectures. Valid values are
.B G2D
and
.B CPU.
G2D is only available on sunxi hardware with G2D support (such as A10).
The default is
.B G2D
on supported platforms, CPU on others.

.TP
.BI "Option \*qXVHWOverlay\*q \*q" boolean \*q
Enable or disable the use of display controller hardware overlays for
XVideo acceleration. Only available on sunxi hardware.
Default: on if supported, off otherwise.

.SH "SEE ALSO"
__xservername__(__appmansuffix__), __xconfigfile__(__filemansuffix__), Xserver(__appmansuffix__),
X(__miscmansuffix__), fbdevhw(__drivermansuffix__)
.SH AUTHORS
Authors include: Gerd Knorr, Michel D\(:anzer, Geert Uytterhoeven, Siarhei Siamashka