9 Dec 2011

Wayland screensaver integration

Continuing on the Wayland screensaver track, I sent a branch for review. The screensaver interface is now fully implemented in both the demo compositor and the demo screensaver. Screenshots below...

The compositor shell plugin of desktop-shell now implements the screensaver interface. This allows a client to register a surface as an idle animation for a given output (monitor). These surfaces remain hidden until the compositor's idle timer triggers, and the compositor fades to black. If there are any screensaver surfaces, the compositor will fade them in, showing the idle animation. The compositor can also be configured to automatically start a screensaver client.

While an idle animation is running, if the shell implements screen locking, the unlock dialog will appear on the first input event, for instance when moving the mouse. The idle animation continues as the background for the unlock screen.

There is another idle timeout running with the idle animation. When that timeout triggers, the compositor fades to black and will seize updating the screen. This also causes properly written animating clients to stop rendering, and we can hit zero CPU usage, even when there is a screensaver active. The compositor will wake from this sleep as usual, and fade in either the desktop directly, or the unlock dialog with the animation in the background.

On returning to the normal desktop, the compositor (the shell plugin, really) will kill the screensaver client if it started it in the first place.

The demo implementation also supports multiple outputs, which is convenient to demonstrate on X. The three Wayland compositor windows are the outputs of a single demo compositor running.

Normal desktop, spread over three outputs, with a few flower clients and a terminal.

The idle animations running on each output with separate state. There is only one screensaver client running.

Idle animation as the background for the unlock screen.

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