present-compositor

Sat, 13 Dec 2014 00:28:06 -0800
tags/fdo

Present and Compositors

The current Present extension is pretty unfriendly to compositing managers, causing an extra frame of latency between the applications operation and the scanout buffer. Here's how I'm fixing that.

An extra frame of lag

When an application uses PresentPixmap, that operation is generally delayed until the next vblank interval. When using X without composting, this ensures that the operation will get started in the vblank interval, and, if the rendering operation is quick enough, you'll get the frame presented without any tearing.

When using a compositing manager, the operation is still delayed until the vblank interval. That means that the CopyArea and subsequent Damage event generation don't occur until the display has already started the next frame. The compositing manager receives the damage event and constructs a new frame, but it also wants to avoid tearing, so that frame won't get displayed immediately, instead it'll get delayed until the next frame, introducing the lag.

Copy now, complete later

While away from the keyboard this morning, I had a sudden idea -- what if we performed the CopyArea and generated Damage right when the PresentPixmap request was executed but delayed the PresentComplete event until vblank happened.

With the contents updated and damage delivered, the compositing manager can immediately start constructing a new scene for the upcoming frame. When that is complete, it can also use PresentPixmap (either directly or through OpenGL) to queue the screen update.

If it's fast enough, that will all happen before vblank and the application contents will actually appear at the desired time.

Now, at the appointed vblank time, the PresentComplete event will get delivered to the client, telling it that the operation has finished and that its contents are now on the screen. If the compositing manager was quick, this event won't even be a lie.

We'll be lying less often

Right now, the CopyArea, Damage and PresentComplete operations all happen after the vblank has passed. As the compositing manager delays the screen update until the next vblank, then every single PresentComplete event will have the wrong UST/MSC values in it.

With the CopyArea happening immediately, we've a pretty good chance that the compositing manager will get the application contents up on the screen at the target time. When this happens, the PresentComplete event will have the correct values in it.

How can we do better?

The only way to do better is to have the PresentComplete event generated when the compositing manager displays the frame. I've talked about how that should work, but it's a bit twisty, and will require changes in the compositing manager to report the association between their PresentPixmap request and the applications' PresentPixmap requests.

Where's the code

I've got a set of three patches, two of which restructure the existing code without changing any behavior and a final patch which adds this improvement. Comments and review are encouraged, as always!

git://people.freedesktop.org/~keithp/xserver.git present-compositor