Developers from Valve have presented the frog-protocols project, which plans to develop an additional set of protocols for Wayland, complementing the protocols from the wayland-protocols set, which supplies Wayland extensions for building composite servers and user environments. The creation of a separate set of protocols for Wayland is explained by the too slow and stalled in endless discussions process of adopting new protocols in wayland-protocols, which can drag on for months and years.
The frog-protocols project aims to bring protocols to users as quickly as possible. According to the initiative's creators, many users continue to work in X11-based environments due to the lack of necessary functionality that could be provided now, but for various reasons, its advancement is being blocked. Completed packages with the first version of frog-protocols have already been accepted into the Arch repositories. 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 were frog-fifo-v1 and frog-color-management-v1. The frog-color-management protocol adds color management extensions that provide HDR capabilities for games. The frog-fifo protocol is noted as being very primitive in nature, but providing important capabilities that address issues with high GPU load when using VSync, performance degradation, and application freezes when their windows overlap with other windows when FIFO/VSync is enabled.
The code implementing the frog-fifo protocol has been submitted for inclusion in the Mesa core. Changes adding protocol support have also been prepared for the KWin compositing manager, which is being developed by the KDE project. The implementation has already been tested and is included in the SteamOS platform (Steam Deck) and the compositing manager. Server Gamescope. The proposed change is aimed at ensuring correct operation of the Wayland client with FIFOs by switching to waiting for the vertical scan (vblank) to complete, rather than using callbacks each time a new frame is ready to be displayed.
During the discussion of the proposed change in Mesa, Simon Ser, one of the developers of wlroots, expressed doubts about the wisdom of adding protocols that bypass the consensus-based development model of wayland-protocols or do not take into account the interests of the Wayland community. Pierre-Loup Griffais of Valve responded that the current development model of wayland-protocols lacks a rapid cycle of experimental protocols that would allow experiments to be conducted, feedback from users to be received immediately, and this feedback to be taken into account in further development.
Source: opennet.ru
