On 05/03/2024 12:26, Pekka Paalanen wrote:
On Mon, 4 Mar 2024 17:59:25 +0000
Terry Barnaby <ter...@beam.ltd.uk> wrote:
On 04/03/2024 15:50, Pekka Paalanen wrote:
On Mon, 4 Mar 2024 14:51:52 +0000
Terry Barnaby <ter...@beam.ltd.uk> wrote:
On 04/03/2024 14:14, Pekka Paalanen wrote:
On Mon, 4 Mar 2024 13:24:56 +0000
Terry Barnaby <ter...@beam.ltd.uk> wrote:
On 04/03/2024 09:41, Pekka Paalanen wrote:
On Mon, 4 Mar 2024 08:12:10 +0000
Terry Barnaby <ter...@beam.ltd.uk> wrote:
While I am trying to investigate my issue in the QtWayland
arena via the
Qt Jira Bug system, I thought I would try taking Qt out of the
equation
to simplify the application a bit more to try and gain some
understanding of what is going on and how this should all work.
So I have created a pure GStreamer/Wayland/Weston application
to test
out how this should work. This is at:
https://portal.beam.ltd.uk/public//test022-wayland-video-example.tar.gz
This tries to implement a C++ Widget style application using native
Wayland. It is rough and could easily be doing things wrong wrt
Wayland.
However it does work to a reasonable degree.
However, I appear to see the same sort of issue I see with my
Qt based
system in that when a subsurface of a subsurface is used, the
Gstreamer
video is not seen.
This example normally (UseWidgetTop=0) has a top level xdg_toplevel
desktop surface (Gui), a subsurface to that (Video) and then
waylandsink
creates a subsurface to that which it sets to de-sync mode.
When this example is run with UseWidgetTop=0 the video frames from
gstreamer are only shown shown when the top subsurface is manually
committed with gvideo->update() every second, otherwise the video
pipeline is stalled.
This is intentional. From wl_subsurface specification:
Even if a sub-surface is in desynchronized mode, it will behave as
in synchronized mode, if its parent surface behaves as in
synchronized mode. This rule is applied recursively throughout the
tree of surfaces. This means, that one can set a sub-surface into
synchronized mode, and then assume that all its child and
grand-child
sub-surfaces are synchronized, too, without explicitly setting them.
This is derived from the design decision that a wl_surface and its
immediate sub-surfaces form a seamlessly integrated unit that works
like a single wl_surface without sub-surfaces would. wl_subsurface
state is state in the sub-surface's parent, so that the parent
controls
everything as if there was just a single wl_surface. If the
parent sets
its sub-surface as desynchronized, it explicitly gives the
sub-surface
the permission to update on screen regardless of the parent's
updates.
When the sub-surface is in synchronized mode, the parent surface
wants
to be updated in sync with the sub-surface in an atomic fashion.
When your surface stack looks like:
- main surface A, top-level, root surface (implicitly
desynchronized)
- sub-surface B, synchronized
- sub-surface C, desynchronized
Updates to surface C are immediately made part of surface B, because
surface C is in desynchronized mode. If B was the root surface,
all C
updates would simply go through.
However, surface B is a part of surface A, and surface B is in
synchronized mode. This means that the client wants surface A
updates to
be explicit and atomic. Nothing must change on screen until A is
explicitly committed itself. So any update to surface B requires a
commit on surface A to become visible. Surface C does not get to
override the atomicity requirement of surface A updates.
This has been designed so that software component A can control
surface
A, and delegate a part of surface A to component B which happens
to the
using a sub-surface: surface B. If surface B parts are further
delegated to another component C, then component A can still be sure
that nothing updates on surface A until it says so. Component A sets
surface B to synchronized to ensure that.
That's the rationale behind the Wayland design.
Thanks,
pq
Ah, thanks for the info, that may be why this is not working even
in Qt
then.
This seems a dropoff in Wayland to me. If a software module wants to
display Video into an area on the screen at its own rate, setting
that
surface to de-synced mode is no use in the general case with this
policy.
It is of use, if you don't have unnecessary sub-surfaces in
synchronized
mode in between, or you set all those extra sub-surfaces to
desynchronized as well.
Well they may not be necessary from the Wayland perspective, but from
the higher level software they are useful to
modularise/separate/provide
a join for the software modules especially when software modules are
separate like Qt and GStreamer.
Sorry to hear that.
I would have thought that if a subsurface was explicitly set to
de-synced mode then that would be honoured. I can't see a usage
case for
it to be ignored and its commits synchronised up the tree ?
Resizing the window is the main use case.
In order to resize surface A, you also need to resize and paint
surface
B, and for surface B you also need to resize and paint surface C. Then
you need to guarantee that all the updates from surface C, B and A are
applied atomically on screen.
Either you have component APIs good enough to negotiate the
stop-resize-paint-resume on your own, or if the sub-components are
free-running regardless of frame callbacks, component A can just
temporarily set surface B to synchronized, resize and reposition it,
and resume.
I would have thought that the Wayland server could/would synchronise
screen updates when a higher level surface is resized/moved by itself.
If the whole window is moved, yes. Clients won't observe the
window moving even if they wanted to.
But a compositor cannot resize anything. Resizing always requires the
client to respond with the surface drawn in the new size before it can
actually happen. Or a whole bunch of surfaces atomically, if you use
sub-surfaces.
I would have thought it better/more useful to have a Wayland API call
like "stopCommiting" so that an application can sort things out for this
and other things, providing more application control. But I really have
only very limited knowledge of the Wayland system. I just keep hitting
its restrictions.
Right, Wayland does not work that way. Wayland sees any client as a
single entity, regardless of its internal composition of libraries and
others.
When Wayland delivers any event, whether it is an explicit resize event
or an input event (or maybe the client just spontaneously decides to),
that causes the client to want to resize a window, it is then up to the
client itself to make sure it resizes everything it needs to, and keeps
everything atomic so that the end user does not see glitches on screen.
Sub-surfaces' synchronous mode was needed to let clients batch the
updates of multiple surfaces into a single atomic commit. It is the
desync mode that was a non-mandatory add-on. The synchronous mode was
needed, because there was no other way to batch multiple
wl_surface.commit requests to apply simultaneously guaranteed. Without
it, if you commit surface A and then surface B, nothing will guarantee
that the compositor would not show A updated and B not on screen for a
moment.
Wayland intentionally did not include any mechanism in its design
intended for communication between a single client's internal
components. Why use a display server as an IPC middle-man for something
that should be process-internal communication. After all, Wayland is
primarily a protocol - inter-process communication.
Well as you say it is up to the client to perform all of the surface
resize work. So it seems to me, if the client had an issue with pixel
perfect resizing it could always set any of its desynced surfaces to
sync mode, or just stop the update to them, while it resizes. I don't
see why Wayland needs to ignore the clients request to set a subsurface
desynced down the tree. In fact does it return an error to the client
when the Wayland server ignores this command ?
Even if the client did not do this and the Wayland surface display was
momentarily slightly wrong, this would be no issue for any of my
programs. Functionality over style all the time in my eyes, its no good
how pretty it is if it doesn't work :) It would not even occur in my
full screen non resizing application anyway.
There really is no internal client communications going through Wayland
here. Its more of the opposite. The idea is that there are a set of
surfaces out there that separate tasks within the client are drawing to.
The Video one in particular has dedicated hardware doing most of the
work. The people in GStreamer, say, involved with video processing and
hardware can do all of this without any knowledge of the clients GUI at
all. The Qt GUI also needs to know nothing of the Video processing
system. They just both know about the surface and the Qt GUI simply
moves, resizes, raises and lowers this surface with no drawing input and
GStreamer just draws and the video sync rate. For an overall system this
separation of duties and knowledge is quite a good method. Qt does not
need to know the internal details of GStreamer processing and GStreamer
does not need to know about Qt. For a Wayland server this is not much
different to handling two separate clients where multiple surfaces are
being composed to the screen. Its no different to a OS kernel managing a
file through separate file descriptors.
I don't understand the Wayland details, but this seems certainly the
best for clients, and a Wayland server should be focused on providing
what is best for the clients needs, it is a client drawing service after
all. This only needs a Wayland server to allow desynced surfaces at any
level in the tree of subsurfaces as far as I can see, but I may be
missing something.
As the software components are separately developed systems it is
difficult to sync between them without changing them, but may be
possible.
Yes, Wayland does many things differently than older toolkits
expected.
...
Is Gst waylandsink API the kind that it internally creates a new
wl_surface for itself and makes it a sub-surface of the given surface,
or is there an option to tell Gst to just push frames into a given
wl_surface?
If the former, then waylandsink is supposed to somehow give you an API
to set the sub-surface position and z-order wrt. its parent and
siblings. If the latter, you would create wl_subsurface yourself and
keep control of it to set the sub-surface position and z-order.
Either way, the optimal result is one top-level wl_surface, with one
sub wl_surface drawn by Gst, and no surfaces in between in the
hierarchy.
Yes, the Gst waylandsink API creates a new subsurface for itself from
the GUI's managed surface to separate itself from the GUI (Qt/Gnomes)
surfaces. It doesn't allow you to provide a surface to directly use. I
don't think it allows the surface to be moved/resized although it can
display video at an offset and size as far as I know (although it may
actually change the surface to do this I will have a look). It doesn't
allow the z-order to be changed I think. It expects the GUI to change
its surface and I guess assumes its subsurface would effectively
move in
z and xy position due to the GUI moving/raising/lowering its surface
(the parent) in a similar manner to how X11 would have done this.
Sounds like gst waylandsink is lacking z-ordering API.
Wayland sub-surfaces are very different from X11 windows. One
fundamental difference is that sub-surfaces can extend beyond their
parent's area. Another is that sub-surfaces always have their own
storage (because you have to explicitly attach wl_buffers to them),
they cannot address the parent's storage like in X11. And more.
X11 windows were perhaps meant for individual widgets like buttons to
optimise drawing and input handling. Wayland sub-surfaces are meant for
things that need a separate wl_buffer in order to be off-loaded to DRM
KMS hardware for direct scanout. It's like the opposite ends of the
granularity spectrum of off-loading things to the display server.
Yes, as far as I know X11 Windows were for individual widgets as well as
overall application windows. When I started programming in X11, in the
later 80's/early 90's there was the X11 Intrinsics toolkit that did just
that. It nicely separated the Widgets drawing from one another
modularising this all down to the protocol and display server level.
Right, and that is the polar opposite of Wayland. Wayland was invented
at a time when application toolkits were basically drawing complete
pixel images of whole windows client-side and sending that image to the
display server. Hence, the deliberate design decision to not push any
client side architectural details into the display server, as there was
simply no need.
That modularising is supposed to happen inside a client toolkit.
Routing internal things through the display server and back is just
extra overhead and latency. One can communicate with in-process
libraries much more efficiently than that.
I don't really think this is really a client side architectural detail,
this seems more like a Wayland API/server limitation.
But
it was inefficient especially when more 3D looking screen objects were
wanted (moving to Motif) and so GUI toolkits started using DRM to draw
to the one Window. Mind you current GUI's have gone back to the plain
and simple early days look again!
The concept of having a generic Window/Surface that can be in a tree
hierarchy is still useful though where you want to modularise software
and/or have separate distinct pieces of software displaying into an
applications GUI. It's a shame Wayland's current surface system doesn't
work well as a tree hierarchy for such things.
Right. Wayland was never meant to do that. I've seen people saying bad
things about XEmbed for instance.
Wayland sub-surfaces were an answer to a very specific problem: how to
leverage display hardware planes. Hardware planes are a much more
efficient way of compositing (parts of) windows than CPU or GPU
composition, but they are also much more scarce and rigid.
Hardware planes are especially useful for videos.
Yes, and that is how I and other previous systems use this. GStreamer is
using 2D/3D hardware and doing all of the hardware processing to a
surface efficiently. Unfortunately some toolkits end up by having to
break this and read the Video stream in to process it using lots of
memcpy and CPU resources, possibly due to this Wayland limitation. These
toolkits are then depending on the GStream API in detail, causing
dreaded version incompatibility trees in a system as it develops.
I will try the middle desync and/or this method by managing the
waylandsink surface outside of waylandsink if I can and if it doesn't
mess up either Qt's or waylandsink's operations.
Thanks for the input.
Thanks,
pq
I believe I have managed to work around this issue without having to
change Qt or Waylandsink API's and code, although I have only tested
under Fedora and not the actual embedded platform it needs to run on.
I couldn't set the QWidgets subsurface to desynced as I cannot get its
subsurface as far as I can see. Qt provides a method to get a QWidgets
wl_surface, but not is wl_subsurface as far as I can see with a brief
look. Its all hidden away (unless I change Qt code) and I couldn't see a
way of doing this from Wayland. Maybe my discussions in the Qt Jira
might lead to a method in the future.
I could probably modify Waylandsink to provide an API to manage its
subsurface, but Ideally I don't want to modify upstream code unless
really needed. Maybe in the long term this is the way to go although
fixing at the Q tlevel sounds better if possible (It would probably need
Qt and waylandsink mods)
I do wonder if gst waylandsink could use API improvements upstream.
Maybe this would help, but also Wayland could do with API improvements :)
What I have done for now, baring a quick cleaner/better method, is to do
work at the Wayland level in my test application. Here for my Video
subwidget, I create a new surface/subsurface from the Qt toplevel
surface, set it to desynced mode and pass that to waylandsink. As I now
have access to the wl_subsurface wayland sink is using as its parent, I
can raise and lower it, position it and resize it giving me some degree
of control. I have had to go through all the Wayland wl_registry work to
get compositor, subcompositor API's to do this (As Qt does not provide
access to all of these). I am unsure if this method will provide the
ability for my video to sit behind transparent background QWidgets, but
I can work without that ability for now in the system I am developing, I
just hope I don't see other issues with this approach,
I'm glad you found something.
Yes, but its a big bodge. It would be nice to do this in a clean, simple
and standard way.
Wayland/Qt/Gstreamer has a knack of getting in your way! I might have to
write/modify an alternative Weston compositor to get around this Wayland
feature/flaw, and support simple top level surface moves etc. (which are
also causing problems, I already have had to add a different shell to
allow the application to move its windows to a separate HDMI screen)
although obviously that is a hack as well but baring a proper way to do
this at least it should work.
Yes, Wayland window management development is very much driven by
generic desktops, which have some conflicting goals with many embedded
designs. On desktops, apps simply do not have all the information to
position their windows while the compositor knows better. Outside of
desktops, the system designer can give the chosen apps the desired
behaviour before the system is deployed.
Weston has kiosk-shell, which allows you to configure which app window
should go on which output, IIRC. The basic assumption in kiosk-shell is
that any active app is fullscreen.
For other Weston uses, there is a rough idea:
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/weston/-/issues/520
Someone might even look into that this year.
Yes, I have produced my own special shell based on the kiosk shell but
the kiosk shell is pretty limited and actually has bugs on the NXP
platform (no background surface drawing).
Personally I think this side of Wayland is its worst area. I think its a
shame it didn't look at X11 and take at least the good ideas from that.
In particular I believe there should be one standard fully featured
Wayland server that can be used on all systems with all desktop/embedded
systems (there can also be alternatives). This would have an external
Window manager API to manage the Windows so that each desktop/embedded
system could then do what it wanted or an embedded application could use
this directly. Having just the one server would allow faster Wayland bug
fixing, better stability and less re-inventing the wheel.
I wish I had time to develop this, even if just for our own usage.
Thanks,
pq
