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Serial Interrupt in OpenGL, which structure to go?

I'm writing an OpenGL software which is driven by UART(serial with help of Boost::asio) in C++ under Linux.

I am currently done with receiving and process data, and ready to visualize it with OpenGL. This question may not be limited with OpenGL, anyway my question is :

How do I call OpenGL drawing function from UART callback function?

Of course, I should be able to get it running by:

  1. Using any of IPC(PIPE, socket, semaphore) methods
  2. Pass the OpenGL drawing function or its class as a variable to the UART callback
  3. Putting everything in one class

I've run into so many similar cases, and implemented in different ways. But I can't still figure out what is THE proper answer.

I personally don't like PIPEs or file IO IPCs, only remaining option is socket, semaphore and shared memory which I've always been using.

Solution

  • How do I call OpenGL drawing function from UART callback function?

    Don't.

    One should draw only from the drawing handler. Serial I/O should be treated like every other input: Process it in the event loop, or the idle handler, use the received data to update variables representing the new state and issue a redraw.

    It's not a tty, but a Linux evdev, but the general idea remains the same: This is a small demo program that shows how to read input from a 3D Connextion Space Navigator and process it into a 3D scene rendering it with OpenGL: http://homepages.physik.uni-muenchen.de/~Wolfgang.Draxinger/stuff/spaceball.tar.bz2