Add notes on throttling, scheduling and atomicity.

Kristian Høgsberg 16 years ago
parent 5ebb317383
commit 19a0ac25b9
  1. 44
      NOTES

44
NOTES

@ -64,6 +64,50 @@ What to do when protocol out buffer fills up? Just block on write
would work I guess. Clients are supposed to throttle using the bread
crumb events, so we shouldn't get into this situation.
Throttling/scheduling - there is currently no mechanism for scheduling
clients to prevent greedy clients from spamming the server and
starving other clients. On the other hand, now that recompositing is
done in the idle handler (and eventually at vertical retrace time),
there's nothing a client can do to hog the server. Unless we include
a copyregion type request, to let a client update it's surface
contents by asking the server to atomically copy a region from some
other buffer to the surface buffer.
Atomicity - we have the map and the attach requests which sometimes
will have to be executed atomically. Moving the window is done using
the map request and will not involve an attach requet. Updating the
window contents will use an attach request but no map. Resizing,
however, will use both and in that case must be executed atomically.
One way to do this is to have the server always batch up requests and
then introduce a kind of "commit" request, which will push the batched
changes into effect. This is easier than it sounds, since we only
have to remember the most recent map and most recent attach. The
commit request will generate an corresponding commit event once the
committed changes become visible on screen. The client can provide a
bread-crumb id in the commit request, which will be sent back in the
commit event.
- is batching+commit per client or per surface? Much more convenient
if per-client, since a client can batch up a bunch of stuff and get
atomic updates to multiple windows. Also nice to only get one
commit event for changes to a bunch of windows. Is a little more
tricky server-side, since we now have to keep a list of windows
with pending changes in the wl_client struct.
- batching+commit also lets a client reuse parts of the surface
buffer without allocating a new full-size back buffer. For
scrolling, for example, the client can render just the newly
exposed part of the page to a smaller temporary buffer, then issue
a copy request to copy the preserved part of the page up, and the
new part of the page into the exposed area.
- This does let a client batch up an unctrolled amount of copy
requests that the server has to execute when it gets the commit
request. This could potentially lock up the server for a while,
leading to lost frames. Should never cause tearing though, we're
changing the surface contents, not the server back buffer which is
what is scheduled for blitting at vsync time.
RMI

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