Plasma Mobile on the Librem 5

[Martin Flöser]

Am 2017-08-29 15:28, schrieb Matthias Klumpp:
> What we would be interested in is knowing about the future plans for
> Plasma Mobile, especially in the area of design and performance
> improvements. I didn't have the opportunity yet to test Plasma Mobile
> on one of our development boards, but I hope I can get to that
> soonish.

Speaking for the KWin (Wayland compositor) part. Ideal would be drm 
support in the phone directly, but that is probably just wishful 
thinking. KWin does have a working Android hwcomposer backend through 
libhybris. That works well and good for the limited use cases we had so 
far. The code base of this plugin is extremely small (< 1000 lines of 
code), which shows that most of the code is shared and it's relatively 
easy to extend and adjust this code base for new needs.

Having done the initial port of KWin to the Nexus 5 I can proudly say 
that KWin performs very well on such kind of hardware. We benefit a lot 
from performance improvements done in the general KWin stack. And we can 
bring improvements from other platforms also to the phone stack. For 
example Roman did a lot of work to get layered compositing working in 
the DRM platform and that would be an ideal candidate to bring also in 
the hwcomposer plugin. Thus we have all the heavy lifting done to do 
things like rendering videos directly in a hardware plane.

One of the things currently being worked on for the phone is to get rid 
of XWayland. This could give you a nice performance boost as you have a 
Wayland only system (of course it's also nice to have X support, but one 
cannot get it with GL support, so the gain is not worth it IMHO).

Cheers
Martin