Developers at Valve have introduced the frog-protocols project aimed at developing an additional set of protocols for Wayland, complementing the protocols from the wayland-protocols set, which supplies Wayland extensions for building compositing servers and user environments. The creation of a separate set of protocols for Wayland is explained by the slow and cumbersome process of adopting new protocols in wayland-protocols, which can drag on for months or years due to endless discussions.
In the frog-protocols project, protocols are intended to reach users as quickly as possible — according to the initiative's creators, many users continue to operate in environments based on the X11 protocol due to the lack of necessary functionality that could be provided now but is being blocked for various reasons. Ready packages with the first version of frog-protocols have already been accepted into the repositories of Arch Linux, Fedora 41 and Fedora 40, and are also in the process of being included in openSUSE.
The first two Wayland protocols included in frog-protocols are frog-fifo-v1 and frog-color-management-v1. The frog-color-management protocol adds extensions for color management, providing capabilities for HDR work in games. The frog-fifo protocol is noted as very primitive in nature, but it provides important features that address issues with high GPU load when using VSync, reducing performance and freezing applications when their windows are overlapped by others with FIFO/VSync enabled.
The code implementing the frog-fifo protocol has been submitted for inclusion in the main Mesa codebase. Changes adding support for the protocol have also been prepared for the KWin compositing manager, developed by the KDE project. The implementation has already been tested in operation and is part of the SteamOS platform (Steam Deck) and the Gamescope compositor. server The proposed change aims to ensure proper functioning of the Wayland client with FIFO by switching to waiting for vertical blanking (vblank) completion instead of using callback calls each time a new frame is ready to be displayed.
During the discussion of the changes proposed in Mesa, Simon Ser, one of the developers of wlroots, expressed doubts about the appropriateness of adding protocols developed bypassing the consensus-based development model of wayland-protocols or those that do not take into account the interests of the Wayland community. Pierre-Loup Griffais from Valve responded that the current development model of wayland-protocols lacks a rapid cycle for promoting experimental protocols, which would allow for experimentation, immediate feedback from users, and its consideration in further development.
Source: opennet.ru
