Porting KWin to Maemo/MeeGo

Speaker: Martin Gräßlin

This talk will discuss the current state of porting KWin to OpenGL ES, which is required to get KWin running on mobile devices such as Nokia N900. KWin is an important part of KDE's Desktop and Netbook workspaces and also a good candidate to run on mobile devices. This would allow the Plasma mobile shell to make use of KWin's effects such as Present Windows.

In the scope of this talk the OpenGL 1 based compositing system will be explained. This motivates the discussion of the required changes to port the system to OpenGL ES. As there are fundamental changes between OpenGL ES 1.1 and OpenGL ES 2.0, two different ports have to be implemented and the port to OpenGL ES 2 will help to add support for OpenGL 3 which will be a useful addition for users of the desktop workspace.

While the port to OpenGL ES 2 requires to add a new Shader based compositing backend, the OpenGL ES 1.1 port has to be built upon the existing OpenGL compositing backend. This requires to remove deprecated rendering calls which are not supported by the ES drivers. The change to more recent OpenGL calls will bring improvements to all users, but at the same time it will raise the requirements to OpenGL version 1.5. Thanks to the current improvements in the free Mesa drivers, it seems safe to increase the requirements finally.

Martin Gräßlin

Martin Gräßlin works as a software developer for the DKFZ (German Cancer Research Center) in Heidelberg, Germany, since finishing his computer science studies. Around the KDE 4.0 release he joined the KWin development team as a free time developer. Part of the work include various OpenGL based desktop effects such as the CoverSwitch window switcher or KDE's Desktop Cube implementation. Next to the desktop effects he is also working on other window management related topics such as a window decoration theme engine.