Denis Oliver Kropp Interview (english)

Presence-PC: Hello Denis Oliver, first question, I think you get used to it:
could you present your-self to our readers ?

  • Denis Oliver Kropp: I'm a 22 year old developer from Berlin and the main developer of DirectFB. My company "convergence GmbH" is developing an MHP (Multimedia Home Platform) implementation on top of a GNU/Linux/DirectFB system.
PPC: Can you explain what is direct FB and how long have you been working on it ?

  • DOK: DirectFB is our sub system for all graphics and input related parts in our architecture. We've started development in July 2000 to fulfill our needs.
PPC: What are the application then of Direct FB ? I have read about DirectFB in embedded application for instance.

  • DOK: Right, as we began implementing the MHP specification consisting of many Java APIs we had exact definitions of what DirectFB had to provide. Today DirectFB has a lot of features and interesting technologies. It can be used for all user interface based appliances including set top boxes, point of sale terminals or industrial control panels. But all implemented proved to be very useful for state of the art desktops or 2D games. We can compete with MacOS X as we had fully accelerated alpha blended windows in the year 2000 already.
PPC: Talking about applications, I have seen some impressive screen-shots of games on your website, do you see directFB as the equivalent of DirectX on GNU/Linux Palteforms ?

  • DOK: In terms of 2D, yes. You can very easily port DirectDraw based games to DirectFB. Developers familiar with DirectX will love our API ;)
PPC: I can imagine that's hard to give a figure on this, but do you have an rougth Idea of the relative performance of LINUX/DFB games compares to MS/DX, as far as games and video are concerned ? does the 'low-weigth' of directFB play a role on this ?

  • DOK: DirectFB and DirectDraw based games have a very comparable performance. But DirectFB provides much more 2D facilities like alpha blending in combination with alpha or color modulation. In fact, DirectFB uses the texture mapping unit of the Matrox, while windows are a texture in video memory.
PPC: One of the most frequent reason why people hesitate to move from propietary software to GNU/Linux solution is the lake of game support on the plateform, do you think directFB can be one solution to bridge the gap ?

  • DOK: Yes, with the recent addition of hardware accelerated OpenGL you can see GNU/Linux/DirectFB as the OpenSource counter part of Windows/DirectX in terms of games and MacOS X in terms of user interfaces.
PPC: Most of the time, free developpers complain about the little support they get from hardware manufacturer, to get suitable drivers for instance. I have seen that you are supporting some Matrox products but do you encounter the same probleme ?

  • DOK: This indeed is the main reason why there aren't much full featured drivers, yet. Matrox released the full documentation to the public, which enabled us to write a full featured driver. If Matrox wouldn't have done so, DirectFB would probably not exist, or at least it would be limited to set top box hardware with closed source drivers.
PPC: What is the position of DirectFB relative to X ? I know that X11 can be a top-level for DirectFB but do you see the developpement of another top-level software especially made for directFB as a possible enhancement way ?

  • DOK: X11 is a network protocol for windowing systems. Limiting DirectFB to be a base technology of X servers would be like using a rocket as a sleigh only. A new desktop and toolkit development from scratch, designed for DirectFB, is highly appreciated.
PPC: Appart from the directFB library itself, do you have other-projects in the pipeline ? What are your developpment priority in the future?

  • DOK: I have a lot of interesting ideas that I would like to implement, but I have to focus on the essentials. While others should write libraries, extensions and applications, I should concentrate on the core technologies.
    One of my planned projects is network transparency at the higher level of DirectFB, i.e. the interface layer. DirectFB provides a hand full of interfaces that are implemented in one or more different ways. Each type of interface will get a network based implementation which communicates with a server that uses the existing implementations as if it would be a local application. You can compare that with Corba, if you like ;)
    An interesting detail of this approach is that if a remote application wants to load a PNG file to create a sprite, it would send the compressed PNG data over network instead of the uncompressed pixel data as an X11 application would do.
PPC: What do you expect from your participation to the Fosdem ?

  • DOK: I expect more people taking part in the development or at least know what DirectFB really is, because I have to admit that our web site s****.

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