Timers and OpenGL

[andy1]

Hi,

in my application I have two rendering contexts. One context is used for normal rendering, and the other context is used for dynamically creating textures in a pbuffer.

Now I would like to use a timer to switch from the pbuffer context to the normal rendering context at constant time intervals, in order to achieve a constant frame rate.

Unfortunately, using the linux system timer ( setitimer(ITIMER_REAL, ...) ) causes segmentation faults or even total system crashes. However, there are no crashes when I block the timer while OpenGL functions are being executed. In the callback function invoked by the timer's SIGALRM signal, other OpenGL functions are called - so might the reason for these crashes be that OpenGL functions are not reentrant?

Any ideas are welcome!


[This message has been edited by andy1 (edited 05-06-2002).]

[nickels]

Can you just post a flag somewhere when your timer goes off. Then, the next time you get a free second, check the flag and if it is set go do your interrupt.
This way you guarantee you are not trying to do several opengl things at once.

[andy1]

But since I have two rendering contexts, shouldn't it actually be possible to do several opengl things at once?

So when the timer expires, I would like to change the context, do some opengl rendering, and then switch back to the other context.

[nickels]

I don't directly know the answer to your question. I had a flight simulator with a separate thread that loaded textures from a file. Whenever I tried to create Opengl textures in this second thread I had serious issues. I ended up just doing it in the main thread.
Good luck.