[idea/request] Standalone compositor

[clapbr]

It would be great to use just the vulkan compositor with other WMs, like people use compton in plasma or xfce. Compton itself was considering a vulkan backend but it still didnt fly. What you think, @jaelpark ?

[jaelpark]

I definitely thought about it already when I started the project, and I still like the idea of implementing such thing.

However there are still a couple of issues I'd like to work out before attempting to make the compositor something more widely usable.. One of the major problems is how to efficiently transform the window contents to something that can be used by Vulkan. The current solution is very much a placeholder, and can be a bit of performance killer in some cases..

I'm working on a solution, and once things start looking more acceptable for something beyond an experimental setup, I will surely look how to get most out of the work already done.

[BujuArena]

I know essentially adding a comment that just expresses interest is not generally acceptable in issue tickets. However, I am curious about the status of this request in this project. I see that there have been several commits referencing this issue since the initial response. So, I have some questions:

• Is the plan still as last described?
• How is it going?
• Where can an enthusiastic outsider help, if possible?

Thanks for this cool project!

[jaelpark]

Thanks for the interest! It's still my goal to have this feature out, and hopefully soon. I think the composition works well enough for this to proceed.

The branch that I've worked on has some preliminary functionality. I've been testing with i3-gaps, and it works, but as of now there are still some breaking issues. The windows are not stacked correctly and I recall there being some problems with workspaces as well. Furthermore, at the moment i3's titlebars have to be disabled, since the compositor does not handle decorations properly.

To make the standalone compositing possible, some minor refactoring had to be done. However, this refactoring seems to have introduced a crash bug that is triggered in some events. Resolving this is the next milestone. I have a test case and I know why the crash happens, but what actually sets the conditions for it is not clear yet and needs more investigation.

Since you asked, I motivated myself to rebase the branch yesterday. I'll do some checks that it's alright and push it here today along with some details. Hopefully with some details it will be easier for interested people to look into it as well! I'll see what I can do about the bug soon when I have some time.

[ndgnuh]

Awesome work. Can you write a guide for using the standalone compositor please? That will help other to do the test and report stuffs too.