Manuel Alfayate Corchete
The KMSDRM backend was doing things wrong because of some small (but important) misconceptions on how KMS/DRM works: to implement a largely broken non-vsync refresh mechanism, the SwapWindow() function was issuing new pageflips before previous ones had completed, thus causing EBUSY returns, buffer mismanagement, etc... resulting in general breakage on vsync disabling from apps, that would not allow vsync to work again without KMSDRM video re-initialization.
To further clarify, on most DRM drivers async pageflips are NOT working nowadays, so all issued pageflips will complete on next VBLANK, NOT ASAP (calling drmModePageFlip() with the DRM_MODE_PAGE_FLIP_ASYNC flag will return error).
The old code was assuming that can just issue a synchronous (=on VBLANK) pageflip and then pass a 0 timeout to the pull() function so we do not wait for the pageflip event, thinking that this will lead to correct non-vsynced screen updates from the program: That is plain wrong.
Each pageflip has to be waite before issuing a new one, ALWAYS. And if we do not support ASYNC pageflips on the DRM driver level, then we are forced to wait for the next VBLANK. There is no way around it.
I have also added many comments on the KMSDRM code. This is needed for future reference for me or others who may need to look at this code: KMS/DRM terminology regarding what SYNC and ASYNC mean in pageflip terms, and where to do certain things and why, is not trivial. It is not desirable or possible to invest time on researching the same concepts every time there is need to dive into this code. So please leave all these comments in the patch.
1. Comment that SDL_SetThreadPriority will make any necessary system changes when applying priority.
2. Add a hint to override SDL's default behavior for scheduler policy.
3. Modify the pthreads SDL_SetThreadPriority so that instead of just using the current thread scheduler policy it will change it to a policy that should work best for the requested priority.
4. Add hint checks in SDL_SetThreadPriority so that #3 can be overridden if desired.
5. Modify the Linux SDL_SetThreadPriority so that in the case that policy, either by SDL defaults or from the hint, is a realtime policy it uses the realtime rtkit API.
6. Prior to calling rtkit on Linux make the necessary thread state changes that rtkit requires. Currently this is done every time as it isn't expected that SDL_SetThreadPriority will be called repeatedly for a thread.
The compiler understands it, but the "qcc" compiler driver doesn't, and the
standard Khronos headers upset QNX anyhow, since they try to include X11
headers in the __unix__ section.
If this is a problem, we can write a test for the compiler flag, but shouldn't
we _always_ use our Khronos headers instead of depending on the system...?
Sam Lantinga
Ryan C. Gordon
Sylvain Becker