Jan Bujak
I wrote a new driver for my gamepad on Linux. I'd like SDL to support it out-of-box, as currently it just treats it as a generic joystick instead of a gamepad. From what I can see the only way to do that is to either 1) pick one of the already supported controllers' PID, VID and button layouts and have my driver send that (effectively lying that it's something else), or 2) submit a preconfigured, hardcoded mapping to SDL.
Both of those, in my opinion, are silly when we already have the Linux Gamepad Specification which standarizes this:
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v4.15/input/gamepad.html
Unfortunately SDL doesn't make use of it currently. So I've took it upon myself to add it; patch is in the attachments.
Basically what the patch does is that if SDL finds no built-it controller mappings for a given joystick it then asks the joystick backend to autodetect it, and that uses the relevant evdev bits to figure out which button/axis is which. (See the specs for more details.)
With this patch applied my own driver for my controller works out-of-box with SDL with no extra configuration and is correctly recognized as a gamepad; this is also going to be the case for any other driver which follows the Linux Gamepad Specification.
Arithmatic operations promote Uint8 to signed int. If the top bit of a
Uint8 is set, and it is left shifted 24 places, then the result is not
representable in a signed 32 bit int. This would be undefined behaviour
on systems where int is 32 bits.
It makes it clearer who owns the memory, and more reasonable to free it on
failure in the creating function.
(and, of course, pacifies static analysis.)
Manuel Alfayate Corchete
On the KMSDRM backend, there is no such thing as a desktop, yet some programs could (and DO) use SDL_GetGlobalMouseState().
So I think its good idea that, in KMSDRM, it returns the same mouse coordinates anyway as SDL_GetMouseState() would return. There is nothing else it could return, as far as I can understand, since there is no desktop anyway.
This small patch does precisely that.
Manuel Alfayate Corchete
The KMSDRM backend was doing things wrong because of some small (but important) misconceptions on how KMS/DRM works: to implement a largely broken non-vsync refresh mechanism, the SwapWindow() function was issuing new pageflips before previous ones had completed, thus causing EBUSY returns, buffer mismanagement, etc... resulting in general breakage on vsync disabling from apps, that would not allow vsync to work again without KMSDRM video re-initialization.
To further clarify, on most DRM drivers async pageflips are NOT working nowadays, so all issued pageflips will complete on next VBLANK, NOT ASAP (calling drmModePageFlip() with the DRM_MODE_PAGE_FLIP_ASYNC flag will return error).
The old code was assuming that can just issue a synchronous (=on VBLANK) pageflip and then pass a 0 timeout to the pull() function so we do not wait for the pageflip event, thinking that this will lead to correct non-vsynced screen updates from the program: That is plain wrong.
Each pageflip has to be waite before issuing a new one, ALWAYS. And if we do not support ASYNC pageflips on the DRM driver level, then we are forced to wait for the next VBLANK. There is no way around it.
I have also added many comments on the KMSDRM code. This is needed for future reference for me or others who may need to look at this code: KMS/DRM terminology regarding what SYNC and ASYNC mean in pageflip terms, and where to do certain things and why, is not trivial. It is not desirable or possible to invest time on researching the same concepts every time there is need to dive into this code. So please leave all these comments in the patch.
1. Comment that SDL_SetThreadPriority will make any necessary system changes when applying priority.
2. Add a hint to override SDL's default behavior for scheduler policy.
3. Modify the pthreads SDL_SetThreadPriority so that instead of just using the current thread scheduler policy it will change it to a policy that should work best for the requested priority.
4. Add hint checks in SDL_SetThreadPriority so that #3 can be overridden if desired.
5. Modify the Linux SDL_SetThreadPriority so that in the case that policy, either by SDL defaults or from the hint, is a realtime policy it uses the realtime rtkit API.
6. Prior to calling rtkit on Linux make the necessary thread state changes that rtkit requires. Currently this is done every time as it isn't expected that SDL_SetThreadPriority will be called repeatedly for a thread.
The compiler understands it, but the "qcc" compiler driver doesn't, and the
standard Khronos headers upset QNX anyhow, since they try to include X11
headers in the __unix__ section.
If this is a problem, we can write a test for the compiler flag, but shouldn't
we _always_ use our Khronos headers instead of depending on the system...?
Sam Lantinga
James Legg
Brendan Shanks
Ryan C. Gordon