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.
One of the annoying things about EGL headers is that they include
platform headers by default, e.g. on X11, it's Xlib.h, etc.
The problem with Xlib.h is that it uses the define compiler directive to
declare constants and those constants have very generic names, e.g.
'None', which typically conflict with enums, etc.
In order to work around bad things coming from Xlib.h, we include
fixx11.h file that contains some workarounds to redefine some Xlib's
types.
There's a flag or rather two flags (EGL_NO_PLATFORM_SPECIFIC_TYPES and
EGL_NO_X11) that are cross-vendor and they can be used to prevent EGL
headers from including platform specific headers, such as Xlib.h [1]
The benefit of setting those two flags is that you can simply include
EGL/egl.h or epoxy/egl.h and the world won't explode due to Xlib.h
MESA_EGL_NO_X11_HEADERS is set to support older versions of Mesa.
[1] https://github.com/KhronosGroup/EGL-Registry/pull/111
Currently, every time compositing is restarted, both the gbm and the egl
streams backend will re-obtain the EGLDisplay object.
This is wrong because the core assumption is that the EGL display doesn't
change once it has been obtained.
