Before of this patch, as explained in the usual
commented-wall-of-text-longer-than-the-actual-patch-itself™, due to the
multithreaded nature of the Wayland thread, it was possible to commit a
surface while the renderer was doing stuff, which was _very_ wrong.
Initially the consequences of such a sin weren't obvious but, now that
explicit synchronization is becoming more and more common, we can't
commit a buffer randomly without basically guaranteeing a nasty, nasty
crash (and we should have avoided commits altogether in the first place
to ensure atomic surface updates).
We now only trigger a commit _in the main thread_ when low processor usage
mode is on _and_ if we know that we won't be rendering anything as, due to
its intermittent nature, it makes "legacy" (pre xdg_wm_base v6) frame
callback based suspension quite annoying.
This is a pretty popular approach that took a while for me to wrap my
head around and which only recently got "official" support through an
update (xdg_shell version 6), so I think that this is all-in-all a
better option than the overkill 2000Hz ticking we have now :P
Basically, we wait for a frame event and, if either too much time passes
or we get the new `suspended` state, we consider the window as "hidden"
and stop drawing, ticking by the low usage rate.
This should work great for KDE and Mutter, which support the new state,
but not yet for sway, which is still stuck at a very old xdg_shell
version and thus falls back to the timeout approach.
Be aware that if we rely on timing out the engine will have to stall for
the whole timeout, which _could_ be problematic but doensn't seem like
it. Further testing is needed.
Special thanks go to the guys over at #wayland on OFTC, who very
patiently explained me this approach way too many times.
Not everything is yet implemented, either for Godot or personal
limitations (I don't have all hardware in the world). A brief list of
the most important issues follows:
- Single-window only: the `DisplayServer` API doesn't expose enough
information for properly creating XDG shell windows.
- Very dumb rendering loop: this is very complicated, just know that
the low consumption mode is forced to 2000 Hz and some clever hacks are
in place to overcome a specific Wayland limitation. This will be
improved to the extent possible both downstream and upstream.
- Features to implement yet: IME, touch input, native file dialog,
drawing tablet (commented out due to a refactor), screen recording.
- Mouse passthrough can't be implement through a poly API, we need a
rect-based one.
- The cursor doesn't yet support fractional scaling.
- Auto scale is rounded up when using fractional scaling as we don't
have a per-window scale query API (basically we need
`DisplayServer::window_get_scale`).
- Building with `x11=no wayland=yes opengl=yes openxr=yes` fails.
This also adds a new project property and editor setting for selecting the
default DisplayServer to start, to allow this backend to start first in
exported projects (X11 is still the default for now). The editor setting
always overrides the project setting.
Special thanks to Drew Devault, toger5, Sebastian Krzyszkowiak, Leandro
Benedet Garcia, Subhransu, Yury Zhuravlev and Mara Huldra.
Riteo
bruvzg
Paulo Poiati
Pedro J. Estébanez
kobewi
Dario
Rémi Verschelde