3.2. Wayland Rendering

One of the details I left out in the above overview is how clients actually render under Wayland. By removing the X server from the picture we also removed the mechanism by which X clients typically render. But there's another mechanism that we're already using with DRI2 under X: direct rendering. With direct rendering, the client and the server share a video memory buffer. The client links to a rendering library such as OpenGL that knows how to program the hardware and renders directly into the buffer. The compositor in turn can take the buffer and use it as a texture when it composites the desktop. After the initial setup, the client only needs to tell the compositor which buffer to use and when and where it has rendered new content into it.

This leaves an application with two ways to update its window contents:

Render the new content into a new buffer and tell the compositor to use that instead of the old buffer. The application can allocate a new buffer every time it needs to update the window contents or it can keep two (or more) buffers around and cycle between them. The buffer management is entirely under application control.
Render the new content into the buffer that it previously told the compositor to to use. While it's possible to just render directly into the buffer shared with the compositor, this might race with the compositor. What can happen is that repainting the window contents could be interrupted by the compositor repainting the desktop. If the application gets interrupted just after clearing the window but before rendering the contents, the compositor will texture from a blank buffer. The result is that the application window will flicker between a blank window or half-rendered content. The traditional way to avoid this is to render the new content into a back buffer and then copy from there into the compositor surface. The back buffer can be allocated on the fly and just big enough to hold the new content, or the application can keep a buffer around. Again, this is under application control.

In either case, the application must tell the compositor which area of the surface holds new contents. When the application renders directly to the shared buffer, the compositor needs to be noticed that there is new content. But also when exchanging buffers, the compositor doesn't assume anything changed, and needs a request from the application before it will repaint the desktop. The idea that even if an application passes a new buffer to the compositor, only a small part of the buffer may be different, like a blinking cursor or a spinner.