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.
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.
