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Diffstat (limited to 'vcl/skia/README')
-rw-r--r-- | vcl/skia/README | 35 |
1 files changed, 35 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/vcl/skia/README b/vcl/skia/README new file mode 100644 index 000000000..f1248d90c --- /dev/null +++ b/vcl/skia/README @@ -0,0 +1,35 @@ +This is code for using the Skia library as a drawing library in VCL backends. +See external/skia for info on the library itself. + +Environment variables: +====================== + +See README.vars in the toplevel vcl/ directory. Note that many backends do not +use Skia. E.g. on Linux it is necessary to also use SAL_USE_VCLPLUGIN=gen . + +There are also GUI options for controlling whether Skia is enabled. + +Skia drawing methods: +===================== + +Skia supports several methods to draw: +- Raster - CPU-based drawing (here primarily used for debugging) +- Vulkan - Vulkan-based GPU drawing, this is the default + +There are more (OpenGL, Metal on Mac, etc.), but (as of now) they are not supported by VCL. + +GrContext sharing: +================== + +We use Skia's sk_app::WindowContext class for creating surfaces for windows, that class +takes care of the internals. But of offscreen drawing, we need an instance of class +GrContext. There is sk_app::WindowContext::getGrContext(), but each instance creates +its own GrContext, and apparently it does not work to mix them. Which means that +for offscreen drawing we would need to know which window (and only that window) +the contents will be eventually painted to, which is not possible (it may not even +be known at the time). + +To solve this problem we patch sk_app::WindowContext to create just one GrContext object +and share it between instances. Additionally, using sk_app::WindowContext::SharedGrContext +it is possible to share it also for offscreen drawing, including keeping proper reference +count. |