Thread safety when rendering on a separate thread

[Pekka Paalanen]

On Mon, 27 Jan 2020 11:43:50 +0100
Guillermo Rodriguez <guillerodriguez.dev at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi all,
> 
> I have a Wayland client where the main loop runs on a thread and
> rendering is done in a separate thread. The main loop simply uses
> wl_display_dispatch:
> 
> while (wl_display_dispatch(globals.display) != -1) {
>     [...process user input...]
> }
> 
> This is the only place where events are processed.
> 
> Rendering however is done on a separate thread, which eventually ends
> up calling:
> 
> wl_surface_attach(surface, buffer, 0, 0);
> wl_surface_damage(surface, x, y, width, height);
> wl_surface_commit(surface);
> wl_display_flush(display);
> 
> Is this safe or do I need to do any additional locking / synchronization?

Hi,

that depends.

First thing is if you have event handlers, for example wl_callback.done
for wl_surface.frame which you really should be using to throttle your
rendering. Event callbacks get dispatched from where the dispatch
function is called, so that could race with your rendering thread.

Another thing is window management. If you handle xdg_toplevel events
and set window state while your animation is already running, it
depends on from which thread you send the window state requests. If you
send those from the rendering thread, it's fine. If you send those from
the main thread, then they will race against your rendering thread
sending wl_surface.commit. In some cases that might even lead to fatal
protocol errors as you cannot reliably operate the protocol correctly.

Usually when threads are involved, you dispatch the wl_display itself
in one thread, and for each other thread touching Wayland you create a
new wl_event_queue and with the help of wl_proxy_create_wrapper() you
assing new protocol objects to the appropriate queue. This ensures the
dispatching will happen in the thread where you want it.


Thanks,
pq
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