This month I’ve worked a lot on Wayland-related projects. The most user-facing feature is probably Variable Refresh Rate (VRR), also called adaptive sync. But what is VRR? Usually screens have a fixed refresh rate (e.g. 60Hz). Each 16.6ms the GPU sends a new image to the screen. This means applications need to render at a strict interval, otherwise they miss the deadline and need to wait a whole frame worth of time before being able to update the screen. VRR relaxes these deadlines and allows the GPU to send frames to the screen a little bit too late. This is great for gaming, because sometimes the game engine misses the deadline by a bit. There are also power-saving and video playback use-cases, but we aren’t there yet.

However, because of some hardware limitations changing the refresh rate too quickly can cause flickering. To workaround this issue, xf86-video-amdgpu uses a special application blacklist and only enables VRR when fullscreen is used. I’m not a fan of this approach, so I’ve started a discussion with amdgpu and i915 developers to see if we could avoid flickering in the kernel driver.

If you want to try this feature out, add output * adaptive_sync on to your Sway config and check it’s enabled with swaymsg -t get_outputs. More details are available in the Sway pull request and the Sway follow-up issue. I’ve also created a small drm_monitor tool to get page-flip timings right out of the kernel.

I’ve also worked on behind-the-scenes improvements for wlroots. My goal is to slowly and incrementally transition into the so-called “renderer v6 redesign”. We want to use GBM liberally to have more control over the rendering pipeline. We want to make use of hardware planes (via libliftoff). Getting all the pieces together is a lot of work though. This month I’ve worked on improving our wlr_buffer interface. A first step splits the client-related state into a separate struct, allowing compositors to create their own wlr_buffer. A second step extends wlr_buffer to make it possible to create our own swap-chains. I’ve also started working on explicit synchronization support.

In other Wayland news, xdg-desktop-portal-wlr has gained support for screen capture! This allows wlroots to interoperate with e.g. Firefox and GNOME apps. It’s still pretty much experimental (for instance it needs to be restarted each time a screen capture ends), but it works. Big thanks to Dan Shick for this nice work!

A new project, wlhangul, enables Hangul (the Korean writing system) input method on Wayland. If you want to try it out, you’ll need the still work-in-progress Sway patches. I’ve been impressed how easy it was to write this small 350 LOC client. Here’s how it looks like:

I’ve made good progress on my IRC bouncer, previously known as jounce but renamed to soju. It’s now using a SQLite database to store users, networks and channels. It has a multi-consumer ring buffer to store history so that only unseen messages are sent to each client. To join a new IRC network, one can just connect to the bouncer with the username <username>@<address>, for instance emersion@chat.freenode.net. Registering or authenticating with NickServ will save the credentials (SASL will be used when connecting). Channels are automatically saved on join and part.

There’s still a lot of work to do. A lot of IRC commands need to be implemented plus some IRCv3 extensions. I’d like to implement a virtual IRC user that accepts commands to manage the bouncer too (ala ZNC’s *status). Docs are also lacking at the moment.

One last thing I’ve been working on is go-ical, a Go library for iCalendar. The existing libraries were either too big or not suitable for serializing iCal, so I had to write a new one. This’ll be useful for koushin’s CalDAV plugin.

See you next month!