path: root/doc/Wayland/en_US/Architecture.xml

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<chapter id="chap-Wayland-Architecture">
  <title>Wayland Architecture</title>
  <section id="sect-Wayland-Architecture-wayland_architecture">
    <title>X vs. Wayland Architecture</title>
    <para>
      A good way to understand the wayland architecture
      and how it is different from X is to follow an event
      from the input device to the point where the change
      it affects appears on screen.
    </para>
    <para>
      This is where we are now with X:
    </para>
    <mediaobject>
      <imageobject>
	<imagedata fileref="images/x-architecture.png" format="PNG" />
      </imageobject>
      <textobject>
        <phrase>
          X architecture diagram
        </phrase>
      </textobject>
    </mediaobject>
    <para>
      <orderedlist>
	<listitem>
	  <para>
	    The kernel gets an event from an input
	    device and sends it to X through the evdev
	    input driver. The kernel does all the hard
	    work here by driving the device and
	    translating the different device specific
	    event protocols to the linux evdev input
	    event standard.
	  </para>
	</listitem>
	<listitem>
	  <para>
	    The X server determines which window the
	    event affects and sends it to the clients
	    that have selected for the event in question
	    on that window. The X server doesn't
	    actually know how to do this right, since
	    the window location on screen is controlled
	    by the compositor and may be transformed in
	    a number of ways that the X server doesn't
	    understand (scaled down, rotated, wobbling,
	    etc).
	  </para>
	</listitem>
	<listitem>
	  <para>
	    The client looks at the event and decides
	    what to do. Often the UI will have to change
	    in response to the event - perhaps a check
	    box was clicked or the pointer entered a
	    button that must be highlighted. Thus the
	    client sends a rendering request back to the
	    X server.
	  </para>
	</listitem>
	<listitem>
	  <para>
	    When the X server receives the rendering
	    request, it sends it to the driver to let it
	    program the hardware to do the rendering.
	    The X server also calculates the bounding
	    region of the rendering, and sends that to
	    the compositor as a damage event.
	  </para>
	</listitem>
	<listitem>
	  <para>
	    The damage event tells the compositor that
	    something changed in the window and that it
	    has to recomposite the part of the screen
	    where that window is visible. The compositor
	    is responsible for rendering the entire
	    screen contents based on its scenegraph and
	    the contents of the X windows. Yet, it has
	    to go through the X server to render this.
	  </para>
	</listitem>
	<listitem>
	  <para>
	    The X server receives the rendering requests
	    from the compositor and either copies the
	    compositor back buffer to the front buffer
	    or does a pageflip. In the general case, the
	    X server has to do this step so it can
	    account for overlapping windows, which may
	    require clipping and determine whether or
	    not it can page flip. However, for a
	    compositor, which is always fullscreen, this
	    is another unnecessary context switch.
	  </para>
	</listitem>
      </orderedlist>
    </para>
    <para>
      As suggested above, there are a few problems with this
      approach. The X server doesn't have the information to
      decide which window should receive the event, nor can it
      transform the screen coordinates to window local
      coordinates. And even though X has handed responsibility for
      the final painting of the screen to the compositing manager,
      X still controls the front buffer and modesetting. Most of
      the complexity that the X server used to handle is now
      available in the kernel or self contained libraries (KMS,
      evdev, mesa, fontconfig, freetype, cairo, Qt etc). In
      general, the X server is now just a middle man that
      introduces an extra step between applications and the
      compositor and an extra step between the compositor and the
      hardware.
    </para>
    <para>
      In wayland the compositor is the display server. We transfer
      the control of KMS and evdev to the compositor. The wayland
      protocol lets the compositor send the input events directly
      to the clients and lets the client send the damage event
      directly to the compositor:
    </para>
    <mediaobject>
      <imageobject>
	<imagedata fileref="images/wayland-architecture.png" format="PNG" />
      </imageobject>
      <textobject>
        <phrase>
          Wayland architecture diagram
        </phrase>
      </textobject>
    </mediaobject>
    <para>
      <orderedlist>
	<listitem>
	  <para>
	    The kernel gets an event and sends
	    it to the compositor. This
	    is similar to the X case, which is
	    great, since we get to reuse all the
	    input drivers in the kernel.
	  </para>
	</listitem>
	<listitem>
	  <para>
	    The compositor looks through its
	    scenegraph to determine which window
	    should receive the event. The
	    scenegraph corresponds to what's on
	    screen and the compositor
	    understands the transformations that
	    it may have applied to the elements
	    in the scenegraph. Thus, the
	    compositor can pick the right window
	    and transform the screen coordinates
	    to window local coordinates, by
	    applying the inverse
	    transformations. The types of
	    transformation that can be applied
	    to a window is only restricted to
	    what the compositor can do, as long
	    as it can compute the inverse
	    transformation for the input events.
	  </para>
	</listitem>
	<listitem>
	  <para>
	    As in the X case, when the client
	    receives the event, it updates the
	    UI in response. But in the wayland
	    case, the rendering happens in the
	    client, and the client just sends a
	    request to the compositor to
	    indicate the region that was
	    updated.
	  </para>
	</listitem>
	<listitem>
	  <para>
	    The compositor collects damage
	    requests from its clients and then
	    recomposites the screen. The
	    compositor can then directly issue
	    an ioctl to schedule a pageflip with
	    KMS.
	  </para>
	</listitem>


      </orderedlist>
    </para>
  </section>
  <section id="sect-Wayland-Architecture-wayland_rendering">
    <title>Wayland Rendering</title>
    <para>
      One of the details I left out in the above overview
      is how clients actually render under wayland. By
      removing the X server from the picture we also
      removed the mechanism by which X clients typically
      render. But there's another mechanism that we're
      already using with DRI2 under X: direct rendering.
      With direct rendering, the client and the server
      share a video memory buffer. The client links to a
      rendering library such as OpenGL that knows how to
      program the hardware and renders directly into the
      buffer. The compositor in turn can take the buffer
      and use it as a texture when it composites the
      desktop. After the initial setup, the client only
      needs to tell the compositor which buffer to use and
      when and where it has rendered new content into it.
    </para>

    <para>
      This leaves an application with two ways to update its window contents:
    </para>
    <para>
      <orderedlist>
	<listitem>
	  <para>
	    Render the new content into a new buffer and tell the compositor
	    to use that instead of the old buffer. The application can
	    allocate a new buffer every time it needs to update the window
	    contents or it can keep two (or more) buffers around and cycle
	    between them. The buffer management is entirely under
	    application control.
	  </para>
	</listitem>
	<listitem>
	  <para>
	    Render the new content into the buffer that it previously
	    told the compositor to to use. While it's possible to just
	    render directly into the buffer shared with the compositor,
	    this might race with the compositor. What can happen is that
	    repainting the window contents could be interrupted by the
	    compositor repainting the desktop. If the application gets
	    interrupted just after clearing the window but before
	    rendering the contents, the compositor will texture from a
	    blank buffer. The result is that the application window will
	    flicker between a blank window or half-rendered content. The
	    traditional way to avoid this is to render the new content
	    into a back buffer and then copy from there into the
	    compositor surface. The back buffer can be allocated on the
	    fly and just big enough to hold the new content, or the
	    application can keep a buffer around. Again, this is under
	    application control.
	  </para>
	</listitem>
      </orderedlist>
    </para>
    <para>
      In either case, the application must tell the compositor
      which area of the surface holds new contents. When the
      application renders directly the to shared buffer, the
      compositor needs to be noticed that there is new content.
      But also when exchanging buffers, the compositor doesn't
      assume anything changed, and needs a request from the
      application before it will repaint the desktop. The idea
      that even if an application passes a new buffer to the
      compositor, only a small part of the buffer may be
      different, like a blinking cursor or a spinner.
      Hardware Enabling for Wayland
    </para>
    <para>
      Typically, hardware enabling includes modesetting/display
      and EGL/GLES2. On top of that Wayland needs a way to share
      buffers efficiently between processes. There are two sides
      to that, the client side and the server side.
    </para>
    <para>
      On the client side we've defined a Wayland EGL platform. In
      the EGL model, that consists of the native types
      (EGLNativeDisplayType, EGLNativeWindowType and
      EGLNativePixmapType) and a way to create those types. In
      other words, it's the glue code that binds the EGL stack and
      its buffer sharing mechanism to the generic Wayland API. The
      EGL stack is expected to provide an implementation of the
      Wayland EGL platform. The full API is in the wayland-egl.h
      header. The open source implementation in the mesa EGL stack
      is in wayland-egl.c and platform_wayland.c.
    </para>
    <para>
      Under the hood, the EGL stack is expected to define a
      vendor-specific protocol extension that lets the client side
      EGL stack communicate buffer details with the compositor in
      order to share buffers. The point of the wayland-egl.h API
      is to abstract that away and just let the client create an
      EGLSurface for a Wayland surface and start rendering. The
      open source stack uses the drm Wayland extension, which lets
      the client discover the drm device to use and authenticate
      and then share drm (GEM) buffers with the compositor.
    </para>
    <para>
      The server side of Wayland is the compositor and core UX for
      the vertical, typically integrating task switcher, app
      launcher, lock screen in one monolithic application. The
      server runs on top of a modesetting API (kernel modesetting,
      OpenWF Display or similar) and composites the final UI using
      a mix of EGL/GLES2 compositor and hardware overlays if
      available. Enabling modesetting, EGL/GLES2 and overlays is
      something that should be part of standard hardware bringup.
      The extra requirement for Wayland enabling is the
      EGL_WL_bind_wayland_display extension that lets the
      compositor create an EGLImage from a generic Wayland shared
      buffer. It's similar to the EGL_KHR_image_pixmap extension
      to create an EGLImage from an X pixmap.
    </para>
    <para>
      The extension has a setup step where you have to bind the
      EGL display to a Wayland display. Then as the compositor
      receives generic Wayland buffers from the clients (typically
      when the client calls eglSwapBuffers), it will be able to
      pass the struct wl_buffer pointer to eglCreateImageKHR as
      the EGLClientBuffer argument and with EGL_WAYLAND_BUFFER_WL
      as the target. This will create an EGLImage, which can then
      be used by the compositor as a texture or passed to the
      modesetting code to use as an overlay plane. Again, this is
      implemented by the vendor specific protocol extension, which
      on the server side will receive the driver specific details
      about the shared buffer and turn that into an EGL image when
      the user calls eglCreateImageKHR.
    </para>
  </section>
</chapter>