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Gecko

12 Apr 2024 : Day 214 #
Yesterday was a minor breakthrough day. I'd normally start off by explaining why, but I can't do a better job than how Leif-Jöran Olsson (ljo) described things on Mastodon last night:
 
The dark ages losing its grip on the rendering origin. While the reminiscences of violet sky still casts its reflection into the void, a Big bang awaits to radiate the 10^122 black matter surfaces onto the infinite screen of the gecko multi-verse

So very evocative! And when you're left peering at the rendering through the prism of a single pixel, it does rather feel like the dark ages.

The reality of this summary is that there's still no rendering to the screen. As it also captures however, I was able to confirm that rendering is happening to the backbuffer surface. That gives me hope, as well as a much better idea about where to focus my efforts, which is in the gap between the backbuffer and the screen.

Unfortunately this is part of the mechanism that I know least about, involving a mysterious combination of Qt, Wayland, OpenGL ES and with only the tip of the technology iceberg protruding into gecko code.

Before heading back to this it strikes me it might be worth me double checking the patches. Raine already suggested some I should look at and I'm concerned I may have missed something else that might be important.

So I'm going to review all 99 patches to check what has and hasn't been applied, just in case I've missed something crucial.

The process is rather laborious: I open the patch in my editor, open the files that have changed and check whether the diffs have been applied. In many cases things have moved around and it takes a bit more than just checking the lines listed in the patch. Instead I'm having to search for prominent bits of code to check whether they exist somewhere in the code base.

It's not hard, but there's also not much to write about: open, check, check, check, note down result, close. Open, check, check, check, note down result, close. Rinse and repeat.

What I've discovered so far today is that the following patches have all been applied and look correct:

0001, 0002, 0003, 0006, 0007, 0009, 0010, 0011, 0015, 0016, 0017, 0018, 0019, 0020, 0021, 0022, 0023, 0024, 0025, 0026, 0027, 0028, 0029, 0030, 0031, 0032, 0033, 0034, 0036, 0037.

The following patches aren't applicable because the code has either changed so much as to make them impossible to apply or irrelevant:

0004, 0005, 0013, 0035.

And finally the following haven't been applied, but might yet need to be:

0008, 0012, 0014.

That means I still have 0038 to 0099 to check. As yet I've not noticed anything missing or misapplied that looks like it might be affecting the offscreen render pipeline. Having said that, as the day comes to an end I can see the next patch — patch 0038 — is very definitely applicable. I'll need to look through it very carefully indeed. But that's for tomorrow when I'm feeling more awake.

Also tomorrow I'll be discussing the outcome of the Sailfish Community Meeting, which turned out to be unexpectedly useful for the tasks I'm working on. More on that tomorrow!

If you'd like to read any of my other gecko diary entries, they're all available on my Gecko-dev Diary page.

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