What is hardware cursor and how does it work?

opengl graphics cursor hardware-acceleration
Luca Carlon picture Luca Carlon · Aug 5, 2011 · Viewed 31.8k times · Source

Is there anyone who can explain how hardware cursor works precisely? How does it relate to the graphics I'm drawing on the screen? I'm using OpenGL to draw, how does hardware cursor relate to OpenGL graphics?

EDIT: For those who may be interested in this in the future I just implemented what is needed to show the cursor with the hardware. The implementation was in the kernel and to use it simple ioctl's were sufficient. Works perfectly.

Answer

datenwolf picture datenwolf · Aug 5, 2011

Hardware Cursor means, that the GPU provides to draw a (small) overlay picture over the screen framebuffer, which position can be changed by two registers (or so) on the GPU. So moving around the pointer doesn't require to redraw the portions of the framebuffer that were previously obstructed.

Relation to OpenGL: None!

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