GNU/Linux Desktop Development

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jul 21, 2023

• Simon Ser: Status update, July 2023

  As usual, this month has been rich in Wayland-related activities. Rose has continued building and upstreaming better frame scheduling infrastructure for wlroots, you can read more on her blog. I’ve resurrected an old patch to make wlroots behave better when the GPU is under high load. In my testing this improves latency a lot some specific scenarios and some specific hardware, but doesn’t help on some others. It’s not super clear if anything can be done about this, it may be that we are hitting some hardware limitations here: GPUs don’t know how to preempt tasks very well.

  I’ve also started working on explicit synchronization again. This was previously blocked on a hard problem: drivers may want to use a new kind of synchronization fence primitive (user-space memory fences) and it wasn’t clear how the current primitives (drm_syncobj) would hold up. We’ve been talking about this new primitive for a few years but unfortunately it’s a complicated matter and nothing new has surfaced. However, after discussing with Daniel Vetter, we’ve come to the conclusion that the kernel will provide backwards compatibility for drm_syncobj, so we can just stop worrying and use that as the basis for explicit synchronization protocols and implementations. Moreover, NVIDIA engineers are interested in helping with this effort, so I hope we can keep the momentum and join forces to push the new protocol, APIs and implementations to the finish line.

• Dave Patrick Caberto: GSoC 2023: Rust and GTK 4 Bustle Rewrite (Week 5 & 6)

  This week, the PR to implement Display for Value, Array, Structure, Dict & Maybe has been merged. Thus, there is a much nicer way now upstream to display zbus::Value, similar to GVariant. With this blocker cleared out, the zbus port MR has also been merged, fully porting the Bustle rewrite to zbus.

• More tr translations and Symphytum menu translated

  Thanks to madanadam for more Turkish translations:

  https://forum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic.php?p=94373#p94373

  Symphytum simple database app now has menu translations for "all" languages:

  https://github.com/bkauler/woofq/commit/acf064ac3e46b31aca99b28d6d59c8b8a07f5a48

  ...note, some lines seem to have empty translations, but that is just a limitation of the font.