[gtk] GTK on memory framebuffer?

[Cam Mayor <cmayor iders ca>]

Hi all,

One of the projects we are looking at right now has a really tight deadline 
for a customer demo.  (that is, our customer wants to demo it to somebody 
else)  We are putting together a clunky demo unit for the first pass as a 
proof of concept.  It runs a linux 2.4.6 variant on an ARM processor, 
which has an LCD framebuffer memory mapped.

We do not currently have any kernel mode LCD or framebuffer drivers.  We do, 
however, have a user mode driver.  That is, we can compile writes to the 
framebuffer into an application via writing raw data.  Ultimately we plan on 
using kernel mode drivers and using gtk for our gui widgets.

Now the question:

Can gtk act on a pure bitmap/framebuffer image (defined only as a data 
structure), or does it need to act on the actual devices of display?   If it 
can operate on a raw image, we can easily do some blitting back and forth 
between two bitmaps kept in memory; the one not being displayed is the one 
modified, until it gets swapped with the currently displayed bitmap.  Is this 
possible with Gtk?  This would allow us to use Gtk for our development for 
the demo, and allow us to keep the overall architecture for the post-demo 
development.

While i'm at it, has anybody else compiled Gtk for the ARM architecture?

cheers,
cam