At the moment, we want to perform compositing immediately after a vblank. The problem with doing so is that it introduces latency. Ideally, the compositor, like a ninja, has to wake up close to the next vblank event, perform a compositing cycle and continue sleeping. This way applications can present their contents with low latency. Another problem is that true per screen rendering is not possible with current frame scheduling mechanism.
This patch set addresses those two problems by introducing a new type that it responsible for scheduling compositing - RenderLoop. On Wayland, every output has a RenderLoop. On X11, the RenderLoop is exposed via the platform.
The RenderLoop tries to minimize the latency by scheduling compositing as close as possible to the next vblank . However, there is no any "silver bullet" algorithm for scheduling repaints, some trade-offs have to be made, unfortunately. Specifically, we have to choose between "latency" and "stable animations." Given that we cannot make such decisions for users, a new option has been introduced to set the desired latency level. By default, it's "Medium", but users may increase it to get more stable animations or decrease it to reduce the latency.
The scheduling algorithm makes two estimates about the expected render time:
- The first estimate is solely based on the user configured latency level. Higher latency levels result in bigger estimated render times, and lower latency levels result in smaller render times
- The second estimate is based on the previous render times
The estimate that has larger render time is used for arming the compositing timer. We make two estimates to stabilize the frame rate.
With the proposed design, animations are advanced to the next expected presentation timestamp. In other words, effects animate windows a little bit ahead of time.
This is still a work in progress. Due to the scale of this merge request, I plan to create a couple of sub-merge requests. Since it's a WIP, some things in the MR are still subject to change.
I run kwin/wayland with this patch on my daily driver machine, and it seems to work fine, but still, bugs are expected.
closes #22 (closed) cc #24