The main motivation behind the split is to simplify client buffer code
and allow adding new features easier, for example referencing the shm
pool when a shm buffer is destroyed, or monitoring for readable linux
dmabuf file descriptors, etc.
Also, a referenced ClientBuffer cannot be destroyed, unlike the old
BufferInterface.
If window quads need to be generated after the wl_surface is destroyed,
the SurfaceItemWayland::mapToBuffer() function will return wrong values.
In order to fix that, we need to store the last surface-to-buffer matrix
in SurfaceItem.
This allows creating a GLTexture object and attaching a dmabuf to it.
Currently, we can do that by using the foreign GLTexture constructor,
but it makes the deletion of the texture handle more error prone.
In the future, we can add a method that allocates the texture storage,
but there's no need for that yet.
The Xrender backend was added at the time when OpenGL drivers were not
particularly stable. Nowadays though, it's a totally different situation.
The OpenGL render backend has been the default one for many years. It's
quite stable, and it allows implementing many advanced features that
other render backends don't.
Many features are not tested with it during the development cycle; the
only time when it is noticed is when changes in other parts of kwin break
the build in the xrender backend. Effectively, the xrender backend is
unmaintained nowadays.
Given that the xrender backend is effectively unmaintained and our focus
being shifted towards wayland, this change drops the xrender backend in
favor of the opengl backend.
Besides being de-facto unmaintained, another issue is that QtQuick does
not support and most likely will never support the Xrender API. This
poses a problem as we want thumbnail items to be natively integrated in
the qtquick scene graph.
One of the scene redesign goals is to make wayland surface items
re-usable. So we have the same rendering path for drag-and-drop icons,
software cursors, and window surfaces.
The biggest issue at the moment is that window pixmaps are tightly
coupled with scene windows.
This change de-couples window pixmaps from scene windows. In order to
achieve that, some architecture changes were made.
The WindowPixmap class was replaced with the SurfacePixmap class. A
surface pixmap is created by a surface item.
Under the hood, a SurfacePixmap will create a PlatformSurfaceTexture
object, which contains all the information necessary for the renderer.
The SceneOpenGLTexture class was removed. However, the GLX and the EGL
on X11 backends still mess with GLTexture's internals.
Once in a while, we receive complaints from other fellow KDE developers
about the file organization of kwin. This change addresses some of those
complaints by moving all of source code in a separate directory, src/,
thus making the project structure more traditional. Things such as tests
are kept in their own toplevel directories.
This change may wreak havoc on merge requests that add new files to kwin,
but if a patch modifies an already existing file, git should be smart
enough to figure out that the file has been relocated.
We may potentially split the src/ directory further to make navigating
the source code easier, but hopefully this is good enough already.
