[RFC] Enforcing Compositing

Martin Gräßlin mgraesslin at kde.org
Sun Feb 20 13:38:40 CET 2011


Hi all,

sending this to both Plasma and KWin as the idea affects the complete 
workspace.

Since 4.2 we have enabled OpenGL based compositing by default and I was 
wondering if in 4.7 we should go the next step: disabling the possibility to 
turn compositing off if supported.

With Mesa 7.10 it seems that the driver problems (Mesa 7.8) which hit us in 
4.5 are finally gone and our new compositor is performing much, much better 
than the one we have in 4.6. This means from a performance perspective I am 
optimistic that we can go such a way.

This would imply the following changes
* Remove the enable checkbox in the compositing KCM
* Remove the suspend/resume compositing button in the same KCM
* Remove the "functionality checks" - the heuristic is rather useless anyway
* Disable unredirect fullscreen windows by default

I would keep
* the shortcut to suspend compositing
* the dbus call to toggle compositing (might be useful for games and so on)

I am unsure about keeping respect to the Compositing/Enabled config option. I 
would say we do not honor it in development mode, but honor it again in the 
branch. This way users could still disable it if something goes bad.

For development it's better to have the option not honored to get bugs 
reported ;-)

If compositing is not supported, it will not try to enable it, so no problem 
for our old, old, old users. (Though I doubt Plasma is of any use in a system 
not supporting OpenGL).

What do you think about this idea?

Cheers
Martin
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