[PATCH wayland] doc: Fill in high level description for Surfaces

[Giulio Camuffo]

2014-12-12 21:37 GMT+02:00 Bryce Harrington <bryce at osg.samsung.com>:
> On Thu, Dec 11, 2014 at 09:49:28AM +0000, Daniel Stone wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> On Thursday, December 11, 2014, Giulio Camuffo <giuliocamuffo at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>> > 2014-12-11 4:04 GMT+02:00 Bryce Harrington <bryce at osg.samsung.com
>> > <javascript:;>>:
>> > > +      A surface manages a rectangular grid of pixels that clients create
>> > > +      for displaying their content to the screen.  Clients don't know
>> > > +      the global position of their surfaces, and cannot access other
>> > > +      clients surfaces.
>>
>>
>> It would be good to make the linkage to wl_buffers clear, i.e. that
>> surfaces do not have intrinsic storage of their own.
>>
>>
>> > > +      A surface has a pair of content buffers that are swapped between
>> >
>> > Uhm, a surface can actually use more than two buffers, that depends on
>> > the client only. For shm buffers, if the compositor supports it, a
>> > surface can even be single buffered without creating artifacts.
>>
>>
>> Yeah, that was my first thought on reading this.
>
> The reference docs for wl_surface::attach say,
>
>  Surface contents are double-buffered state, see wl_surface.commit.
>

This means that state such as the buffer set with the attach request
is double buffered, that is it becomes the active state after a
commit(). It doesn't mean the surface has two buffers, the state is
double buffered, not the buffer. You can attach a different buffer
each time, or prerender an animation completely upfront and then feed
the compositor all the buffers you have one by one, that is a client
choice only.

> Most of the other wl_surface requests similarly mention double-buffered
> surfaces.  Nothing there discusses single-buffers, and nothing describes
> a multi-buffered state, although wl_surface::commit includes this
> (rather ambiguous) statement:
>
>  Other interfaces may add further double-buffered surface state.
>
> (Whatever this actually means, it probably should be elaborated on.)

It means other protocol extensions may add more state that becomes
active when the user calls commit(). As an example, i think the
geometry set in xdg_shell with xdg_surface.set_window_geometry is
double buffered.

>
> It's possible I've missed something or I'm just dumb, but if >2 buffers
> is a thing that should be documented to users, then I'd expect the
> reference docs to cover it.
>
>> > > +      the client and the compositor.  Once the client has finished
>> > > +      writing pixels, it 'commits' the buffer; this permits the
>> > > +      compositor to access the buffer and read the pixels.  When the
>> > > +      compositor is finished with a buffer, it releases it back to the
>> > > +      client.  This way, the client can begin writing the next buffer
>> > > +      while the compositor is processing the current one.
>> >
>>
>> It might also be nice to clarify that this can happen at any time:
>> instantly (i.e. copying into a shadow buffer, such as SHM buffers on GL/RPi
>> renderers), immediately on the next attach/commit (i.e. a renderer with no
>> scanout promotion that does a blit for final presentation, such as GL
>> buffers on GL renderer), or sometime later (buffer promoted directly to
>> scanout, such as a DRM/atomic backend). But ideally without reference to
>> those specific cases, as they're really just implementation details that
>> can change.
>
> Alright, I've rephrased this - hopefully not butchering the meaning in
> the process.  Please review my updated patch, which i'll post directly.
>
> Thanks for the review (and explanations of how things work!)
>
> Bryce