At the moment, our frame scheduling infrastructure is still heavily
based on Xinerama-style rendering. Specifically, we assume that painting
is driven by a single timer, etc.
This change introduces a new type - RenderLoop. Its main purpose is to
drive compositing on a specific output, or in case of X11, on the
overlay window.
With RenderLoop, compositing is synchronized to vblank events. It
exposes the last and the next estimated presentation timestamp. The
expected presentation timestamp can be used by effects to ensure that
animations are synchronized with the upcoming vblank event.
On Wayland, every outputs has its own render loop. On X11, per screen
rendering is not possible, therefore the platform exposes the render
loop for the overlay window. Ideally, the Scene has to expose the
RenderLoop, but as the first step towards better compositing scheduling
it's good as is for the time being.
The RenderLoop tries to minimize the latency by delaying compositing as
close as possible to the next vblank event. One tricky thing about it is
that if compositing is too close to the next vblank event, animations
may become a little bit choppy. However, increasing the latency reduces
the choppiness.
Given that, there is no any "silver bullet" solution for the choppiness
issue, a new option has been added in the Compositing KCM to specify the
amount of latency. By default, it's "Medium," but if a user is not
satisfied with the upstream default, they can tweak it.
The compositing timing algorithm assumes that glXSwapBuffers() and
eglSwapBuffers() block. While this was true long time ago with NVIDIA
drivers, nowadays, it's not the case. The NVIDIA driver queues
several buffers in advance and if the application runs out of them,
it will block. With Mesa driver, swapping buffer was never blocking.
This change makes the render backends swap buffers right after ending
a compositing cycle. This may potentially block, but it shouldn't be
an issue with modern drivers. In case it gets proven, we can move
glXSwapBuffers() and eglSwapBuffers() in a separate thread.
Note that this change breaks the compositing timing algorithm, but
it's already sort of broken with Mesa drivers.
