Development and analysis of a window manager concept for consolidated 3D rendering on an embedded platform

Abstract

Nowadays with the information technology rapidly developing, an increasing number of 2D and 3D graphics are used in automotive displaying systems, to provide vehicle information, driving assistance, etc. With the demand of 3D models interacting with each other, an implementation should have a 3D compositing capability. However, traditional 2D compositing implementations are not capable of 3D models compositing tasks. In order to composite 3D graphics on embedded platform, the 3D compositing implementation is necessary. Therefore, a concept of window manager is developed aiming to composite 3D graphics with an optimized efficiency for embedded platform. Specially for automotive platforms, a virtualization is made to unify multiple Electronic Control Units (ECUs) into one single ECU platform. On this platform, a server and multiple clients are implemented with dedicated Virtual Machines (VMs). The server is in charge of rendering tasks requested from clients. Based on this, a 3D compositing concept is implemented. It handles efficiently the multiple 3D applications situation using a method of off-screen rendering. A server-side virtualization is also implemented by replacing certain client-side commands during commands forwarding. With this virtualization implementation, multiple applications run simultaneously with accessing single 3D GPU only. Moreover, due to this implementation, monolithic rendering operations affecting all applications, e.g. uniform lighting operation, are possible.