Improving presentation on Wayland

In the last two (or three?) weeks at Collabora I have been looking into a Wayland protocol extension that would allow accurately timed presentation. Accurate timing is essential for two quite different use cases: video playback with audio/video synchronization, and interactive GUI with just-in-time redrawing. Video playback with A/V sync was our primary goal when we started working on this, and there is Frederic Plourde's first proposal from October 2013. Since then I have realized that also other kinds of applications need timings, especially feedback on when their content updates were shown, and when is the next chance to show an update (vblank). Primarily my re-design started with the aim to improve resizing performance when I got the assignment from Daniel Stone to push Wayland presentation protocol forward. The RFC v2 of Wayland presentation extension is now out for review and discussion.

I looked at various timing and content posting related APIs, like EGL and its extensions, GLX_OML_sync_control, and the new X11 Present and Keith's blog posts about it. I found a couple of things I could not understand what they were for and asked about them on a few mailing lists. The replies and further pondering resulted in a conclusion that I do not have to support the MSC modulus matching logic, and eglSwapInterval for intervals greater than one could be implemented if anyone really needs it.

I took a more detailed look at X11 Present for XWayland purposes. The Wayland presentation protocol extension I am proposing is not meant to solve all problems in supporting X11 Present in XWayland, but the investigation gave me some faith that with small additional XWayland extensions it could be done. Axel Davy is already implementing Present on core Wayland protocol as far as it is possible anyway, and we had lots of interesting discussions.

I am not going into any details of the RFC v2 proposal here, as the email should contain exhaustive documentation on the design. If no significant flaws are found, the next steps would be to implement this in Weston and see how it works.