Announcing: Frog Protocols for Wayland 🐸
Let's create Wayland Protocols but much more iterative.
Wayland Protocols has long had a problem with new protocols sitting for months, to years at a time for even basic functionality.
This is hugely problematic when some protocols implement very primitive and basic functionality such as frog-fifo-v1, which is needed for VSync to not cause GPU starvation under Wayland and also fix the dreaded application freezing when windows are occluded with FIFO/VSync enabled.
We need to get protocols into end-users hands quicker! The main reason many users are still using X11 is because of missing functionality that we can be shipping today, but is blocked for one reason or another.
Check out the repo here! github.com/misyltoad/frog-prot…
and the Mesa MR that adds support for frog-fifo-v1 to fix these issues and goes into much more detail: gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/me…







Simon Ser
in reply to autumn • • •autumn
in reply to Simon Ser • • •Pekka Paalanen
in reply to autumn • • •Pekka Paalanen
in reply to Pekka Paalanen • • •Pekka Paalanen
in reply to Pekka Paalanen • • •Pekka Paalanen
in reply to Pekka Paalanen • • •Pekka Paalanen
in reply to Pekka Paalanen • • •Pekka Paalanen
in reply to Pekka Paalanen • • •Pekka Paalanen
in reply to Pekka Paalanen • • •But anyone can just make extensions and ship them outside of wayland-protocols. This was even a goal in the early days when @krh was still developing Wayland. Let downstreams mature extensions, and then let them grow their support organically.
I think that idea still carries, but we need to think how to deal with the fragmentation.
wayland-protocols partly came about from the desire to have "blessed ground" for known-good extensions.
Pekka Paalanen
in reply to Pekka Paalanen • • •Neal Gompa (ニール・ゴンパ)
in reply to Pekka Paalanen • • •I think you've kind of hit the nail on the head as to why we have a problem now and why frog-protocols now exists.
When I talk to folks who develop compositors, the majority of them don't support this idea that protocols need to be perfect before they land. On the contrary, it seems to be burning people out to try to deal with that expectation. Also, I think that the "principles" had little influence on adoption of Wayland, but rather desperation to replace X11.
Neal Gompa (ニール・ゴンパ)
in reply to Neal Gompa (ニール・ゴンパ) • • •In practice, it does not seem to be as hard as it looks to get wide agreement, it's just much harder to get *universal* agreement. It often seems like the latter is necessary to get anything done, and that's something we need to put more effort into squashing.
There also seems to be a fear of "dead batteries", but I don't think that's something we should be concerning ourselves. Things tend to naturally work themselves out over time anyway.
Neal Gompa (ニール・ゴンパ)
in reply to Neal Gompa (ニール・ゴンパ) • • •