The challenge
An industrial display platform needed remote viewing and control as well as local video playback. Both workloads competed for memory bandwidth, CPU time and graphics resources that were already shared with the primary operator interface.
Engineering approach
Crossware treated capture, transport, composition and playback as one performance path. Direct framebuffer access reduced unnecessary copies, dirty-region tracking limited updates to changed areas and the integration with Weston kept capture aligned with the actual display lifecycle.
Balancing local and remote workloads
Queue behaviour, clipping, update frequency and memory ownership were profiled on the target. The video player was integrated with the same resource constraints in mind, including predictable window behaviour and external application control. This prevented remote access from becoming a separate desktop-style subsystem.
Delivered capabilities
- Direct framebuffer access with libdrm
- Dirty-region tracking, clipping and reduced memory copying
- Transport and queue-management optimisation
- Weston backend integration and target-side profiling
- Controllable local video playback within the industrial HMI
- Stability, performance and concurrent-workload validation
Outcome
The platform gained practical remote-service and media capabilities while preserving the responsiveness of its primary HMI. The work demonstrates how low-level Linux graphics knowledge can unlock product features that are difficult to deliver through application changes alone.