KDE KWin's Move Away From GBM Surfaces

[phoronix]

Phoronix: KDE KWin's Move Away From GBM Surfaces

KDE developer Xaver Hugl has written a blog post how the KWin compositor's DRM back-end has been working to move itself off GBM surfaces (gbm_surfaces) to instead allocate buffers directly and import them into EGL. This ultimately should be a win for the KWin compositor once everything is complete...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/KDE-KWin-Moves-From-GBM-Surface

[Danny3]

Hoestly, I wish that KDE would solve first the heavy dependency of the display server on the storage IO, as every time a program / script / whatever does some heavy IO to the storage, KDE Plasma becomes very slow to respond and even freeze.
Good luck using KDE Plasma on a BTRFS + Zstd compresion file system and then compress / uncompress or copy / move many folders and files!
I even saw web browser benchmarks making KDE Plasma stutter or freeze for a few moments.

[Michael]

No link to the blog post?

HTML got messed up, should be there now, thanks.

[cl333r]

Hoestly, I wish that KDE would solve first the heavy dependency of the display server on the storage IO, as every time a program / script / whatever does some heavy IO to the storage, KDE Plasma becomes very slow to respond and even freeze.
Good luck using KDE Plasma on a BTRFS + Zstd compresion file system and then compress / uncompress or copy / move many folders and files!
I even saw web browser benchmarks making KDE Plasma stutter or freeze for a few moments.

The Linux UI becoming much less responsive when you have IO in the background is my OLDEST issue with Linux (and it happens randomly and more rarely than in the past, or it's just that I moved to SSD), there were a lot of bug reports, some fixed, some whatever.

I don't think it will be fixed in the next 10 years because the avg Linux user is a server guy caring about I/O and throughput and totally not caring what the UI is like during this.

Window$ OTOH is mostly a desktop OS and due to this never developed this bizarre dependency of random horrible UI responsiveness while under IO.
Just my 0.02¥.

[baka0815]

GBM vs. EGL - wasn't that also part in some NVIDIA-struggle about implementing Wayland bindings or something like that?
But maybe I misremember that...

[cl333r]

GBM vs. EGL - wasn't that also part in some NVIDIA-struggle about implementing Wayland bindings or something like that?
But maybe I misremember that...

It was, and IIRC it was about Nvidia not liking some limitations about gbm buffers and saying EGL buffers are better, after all Nvidia could have been right hehehe

[loganj]

i have to give up on kde for now. plasma started to consume 10-18% cpu in idle all the time. i wonder if somehow the indexing crap was reenabled by the new updates

[Mitch]

Thrse KWin improvements sound really exciting. I wonder when we'll see them land.

[Sethox]

It was, and IIRC it was about Nvidia not liking some limitations about gbm buffers and saying EGL buffers are better, after all Nvidia could have been right hehehe

Impressions matters right? If I remember right, Nvidia came in later for the EGL comments, after for months saying "No support for Wayland", after a while finding a solution. The impression a person got from that (if I remember it correctly) was that Nvidia having a strong rejection to Wayland support and then comes in saying their solution is the absolute right one. EGLstreams I think the thing for Nvidia Wayland support. Correct me if I am wrong.

In any case, right or wrong, there are ways to work with people.

[osw89]

i have to give up on kde for now. plasma started to consume 10-18% cpu in idle all the time. i wonder if somehow the indexing crap was reenabled by the new updates

Something might be wrong with your settings. On my system kwin idles at ~1% and plasmashell oscillates between 0% and 1%. Did it start behaving this way after an update?