GNOME 40 Mutter Moves Input Work To A Separate Thread

[leipero]

Apart from the UI/UX design flaws, either subjective or objective, this was the one biggest architectural flaw in Gnome, am I right? (I'm really asking)
I'm happy to see this fixed. Moves the whole Linux ecosystem forward and I can't wait to try it on PopOS

The list is long..., it is for sure one of the important factors in user experience, that's for sure.

wizard69

More good news. The more gnome leverages all the cores in modern processors the better.

Indeed, but with limitation. The less resources used for achieving the same goal the better as well as well.

[ix900]

Whaaaat? Amiga cooperative? No fam, the Amiga operating system was fully preemptive. Sure its system scheduler and the lack of memory protection makes it a bit primitive, but the multitasking wasn't only top notch, back in the day it was impressive for such a home computer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exec_(Amiga)

Windows 3.x MacOS before X were cooperative.

Okay, we now know your love for Amiga lol. Sadly, it wasn't impressive enough to have gone anywhere. You can cuddle it in a blanket and rock it to sleep if you want.

[144Hz]

JackLilhammers Why PopOS?

[dylanmtaylor]

I absolutely love how much more responsive GNOME has gotten in recent releases. GNOME 3 used to be so ridiculously slow and painful to use.

[lakerssuperman]

This is amazing. One of my last and largest issues with Gnome on Wayland is the laggy cursor. If this change fixes that issue, I think I will finally be on Wayland full time!!

[spykes]

JackLilhammers Why PopOS?

PopOS adds cherry above the Gnome cake, it often implements features that was rejected from the Gnome team (for no good reason).

[sabian2008]

Is this only for Wayland?

[dragon321]

Is this only for Wayland?

On X11 it's X Server job to handle input and window manager/compositor is separate process. On Wayland compositor does everything that X Server does so it needs to handle input as well. Obviously such patches are not needed for X.Org session.


Finally. It was probably one of the biggest (if not biggest) flaw in GNOME Wayland session. It was very annoying seeing cursor lags with heavy IO. I hope it will be finally gone with these patches.

[oiaohm]

I was using multi-threaded applications on the Amiga days... What happened - why isn't important and critical things not in separate worker threads already?

Problem is it not broken don't fix it.

Gnome started 1997 Intel Pentium II time frame this is a single core cpu right. Go back with X11/x.org server it also starts on single core cpus. Horrible as it sounds on a single core cpu the best performance is not separate worker threads but single threaded. So at the start of both of these projects it not broken to go single thread and separate workers on the systems they started on was going to use more cpu time so perform worse back then.

Then everything slowly but surely builds on top of this framework. Now you have something in your project like the Giant lock https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_lock what Linux world would big kernel lock. Where different code all of the place depends on the fact that what is in the single threaded is basically locked against itself and will only happen in that exact order. Remember linux kernel had to write a tool lockdep https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documenta...dep-design.txt to dig themselves out of stack of single thread code at its core. Yes early Linux kernel also started on single core cpus so single threaded core parts was right.

This is one of these problems where the choice at the start is right but over time it comes wrong and the nightmare is that its not a little wrong you have dug yourself into a complex hole where you have implement locking as well as working out what parts can truly be run without locking against each other. Lots of fun cases of dead locks for anyone attempting to fix this problem to over come as well.

Notice Linux kernel had to make lockdep. Did gnome need to make a tool as well kind of it was adding support to sysprof to handle the core shell of gnome(kind allows you to see where a deadlock is).

Basically easy to create very hard to dig you way out of. All giant lock problems are multi year fixes and are like to be ignored by developers as they go and do other easier work Gnome is not a special case here.

[oiaohm]

Okay, we now know your love for Amiga lol. Sadly, it wasn't impressive enough to have gone anywhere. You can cuddle it in a blanket and rock it to sleep if you want.

http://www.aros.org/ Not quite it was impressive enough to have a clone maintained right up today.