On Friday, 28 January 2022, at 10:55 AM, Frank D. Engel, Jr. wrote:
> As far as I can tell this would require practically zero core
      changes to the system as it is built entirely on existing
      primitives already offered.



What you are suggesting is a higher level filesystem and libdraw combined with the panel library is implemented in a comparable way. This results in decrease of performance. Because the renderer has to read all the files for all visible regions on the screen and combine them for the display image.

 memdraw and memlayer which are used by devdraw are doing a similar job they combine image memory layers to form the resulting display image.

What I suggest is a lower level interface to use the framebuffer directly and I think devdraw (memdraw, memlayer) is too high level and rio oriented. If you use devdraw as a framebuffer than the only functions you need from devdraw are initdraw, loadimage and flushimage which internally use memdraw and memlayer in a way that decreases performance. Also the transfer of images in this way is expensive (regarding time) a screen image is at least copied two times. So by defining a lower level we could improve the performance of rendering by a factor of two. 

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