dispmanx: disable framebuffer layer

[lb]

The Linux framebuffer is a regular dispmanx layer. Is there some way to (temporarily) disable compositing of the framebuffer layer while an application runs? I've seen people add an opaque black layer on top of the framebuffer layer to mask it, but that seems counterintuitive. The framebuffer layer will still eat memory bandwidth, right?

[anszom]

The OP has probably moved on, but I've been looking for an answer to the same question. It seems that "blanking" the framebuffer by writing 1 to /sys/class/graphics/fb0/blank disables the dispmanx layer. This can be verified with "vcgencmd dispmanx_list"

[6by9]

There's also a flag DISPMANX_FLAGS_ALPHA_DISCARD_LOWER_LAYERS that you can pass in for your layer that removes all lower layers from the list. That's generally easier to do than messing with sysfs.