Direct Rendering Infrastructure

The Direct Rendering Infrastructure ( DRI abbreviated ) is a framework which is intended to enable a possible direct yet secure and stable access to 3D accelerator. The name comes from the fact that indirect rendering, has been replaced approximately over the GLX protocol.

Software Architecture

The DRI consists of a kernel module Direct Rendering Manager (DRM ) of an interface to the graphics card provides and components in userspace access this. The userspace part of the DRI provides a hardware-accelerated back-end for Mesa ready and translates the commands of the application in hardware-specific commands that it sends to the graphics card via the DRM.

DRI2

The development of a follow-up version of DRI is being promoted since 2007, in particular, puts an end to several weaknesses of DRI in conjunction with AIGLX. In early 2008 the first DRI2 graphics drivers were taken into the developer Tree of X.Org server.

DRI3

DRI3 was released on 1 November 2013. It includes numerous changes from DRI2 especially about safety.

Driver support

DRI is supported by almost all free drivers in the X.Org server and XFree86. Some proprietary drivers such as AMD / ATI also support DRI.

History

Only indirect image synthesis over the GLX protocol was possible; , there was Utah GLX driver

Early Direct Rendering Infrastructure

Hardware Access Manager is only via the Direct Rendering possible

In Linux kernel 3:12 render nodes were introduced and the KMS was cleaved. Wayland implemented " direct rendering " on EGL.