Wayland R&D at Collabora

While being contracted by Collabora, I started a Wayland R&D project in October 2011 with the primary goal of getting to know Wayland, and strengthening Wayland expertise in Collabora. During the four months I started the wl_shell_surface protocol for desktops, added screen locking, ported an X screensaver to Wayland with new protocol, and most recently implemented surface transformations in Weston (the reference compositor, originally the wayland-demos compositor). All this sponsored by Collabora.

The project started by getting wayland-demos running under X, and then looking into the bugs I hit. To rule out problems in hardware GL renderer, I also got the demos running with softpipe and llvmpipe. Trying to fix segmentation faults and other obvious problems was my stepping stone into the Wayland code base.

My first real piece of work was screen locking. That included adding special protocol for it, having a way to have privileged Wayland clients, implementing locking in the shell plugin in the compositor, and writing an unlock dialog for the desktop-shell client. Those are the obvious parts. I also had to extend the shell plugin interface, find a way to hide surfaces so they do not render while the screen is locked, and of course bug hunting and patch set rebasing and rewriting, before screen locking landed upstream.

Next was porting an X screensaver as a regular Wayland client. Once that worked, I extended the protocol by adding a screensaver interface, and made the shell plugin automatically start the screensaver application. Handling screensavers would have been a walk in the park, except I needed shell-specific data to be attached to all surfaces. I wrote a hacky solution, but in the end, Kristian Høgsberg wanted me to add a whole new interface into the shell protocol for this. It became the wl_shell_surface interface, and all demo clients needed to adopt it. Yet that was not all. Since we are used to have per-monitor screensavers, I needed my screensaver to set different instances for each monitor. Hence I had to add output event callbacks in the toytoolkit.

A cleanup phase came next, I took Valgrind and ran. I fixed a pile of memory leaks and wrote missing destructor functions all over, in compositor, clients and the toytoolkit, at the same time collecting a Valgrind suppressions list to ease Valgrinding in the future. This work included adding some ad hoc way of cleanly exiting demo clients.

In January there were some discussions on maximised and full-screen surfaces, what they are and how they should be implemented. Surface scaling was raised as one point. Weston already had the zoom effect, and full-screen scaling would be another surface transformation, so I decided to write a transformation matrix stack for supporting any number of simultaneous transformations. It turned out to be a three week task.

Implementing surface transformations required changes all over Weston. First, I needed a way to invert the transformation which is a 4-by-4 matrix. After searching in vain for a MIT-licenced C implementation I wrote one myself, based on LU-decomposition. I believe LU-decomposition is more efficient on a 4x4 matrix than the cofactor method. Along the inversion routines, I wrote a unit test application for testing the speed and precision of the inversion. Detecting and dealing with non-invertible transformations is also important.

Going through the transformation stack every time you need to transform a point might be costly, so I added a cached total transform and its inverse. Implementing input redirection was a simple matter of applying the inverse total transform to pointer coordinates. Needing a way to test transformations, I added a Weston key binding for rotating surfaces, and modified an existing demo application to mark the clicked point. Adding functions for explicitly converting between display global coordinates and surface local coordinates (surface local are the only ones a client knows of) clarified some of the coordinate computations.

Surface painting and damage region tracking needed fixes, too. Previously, a zoomed surface was repainted as a whole, and it forced a full display redraw, i.e. damaging the whole display. Transformed surface repaint needed to start honoring the repaint regions, so we could avoid excessive repainting. Damage and repaint regions are tracked as global coordinate axis aligned rectangles. Whenever a transformed surface is damaged (requires repainting), we need to compute the bounding box for the damage instead of simply using the global x, y of the top-left corner and the surface width, height. Then during surface painting, we take the list of damage rectangles, and render only those. Surface local coordinates (texture coordinates) are computed via the inverse transformation. This method may result in sampling outside of a surface's buffer (texture), so those samples need to be discarded in the fragment shader.

Other things that needed fixing after the surface transformations were window move and resize. Before fixing, moving a surface would not follow the pointer but move in the surface local orientation. Resize needed the same orientation fix, and another fix in relative surface motion that a client can set in the surface's attach request.

What you mostly see as the result of the surface transformations work is, that you can rotate any normal window, no application support needed. The pointer position on screen, over a window, accurately corresponds to what the application receives as the local pointer location. I did not realise it at the time, but this input redirection working flawlessly became an appreciated feature. Apparently it is hard or impossible to do in X, I would not know. In Wayland, and for me, it was just another relatively easy bug to be fixed. The window rotation feature was meant purely for debugging surface transformations.

Two rotated windows and some flowers.

There are still further issues to be fixed with surface transformations. Relative surfaces, like pop-up windows and menus, are not transformed and appear at a wrong location. Pointer cursors are not transformed; you would want the text bar cursor to be aligned with the text orientation. Continuously resizing a transformed window from its (locally) top-left corner makes the window drift away. We are probably still damaging larger regions than absolutely necessary for repaints. Repaint optimisation of opaque surfaces does not work with transformations.

During all this work of four months there were also the usual bug hunts, enhancements and fixes all over. For example, decorationless EGL apps, which turned out to have been a bug in Cairo, and moving the configuration file parser into a helper library that is shared between clients and the compositor.

Now, I am done with the Wayland R&D project and moving into another project at Collabora. In the new project I will continue working on Wayland, Weston, and the demos.