In this blog post I want to outline some thoughts on how the gaming experience can be improved on Linux.

Situation on X11

On X11 the big problem for gaming is the Compositor. Games need access to the GPU and need to pretty much exclusively use the GPU. Compare to a true console like a PlayStation: while the game is running you can be sure it’s the exclusive user of the GPU. The way how compositing works on X11 this cannot be provided. There is the compositor which needs to render the scene. The setup looks simplified like:

Game renders through OpenGL/GLX X-Server notifies Compositor through XDamage extension Compositor schedules a repaint for changed area Compositor uses the XComposite extension to get a pixmap for the Game window Compositor binds pixmap to an OpenGL texture Compositor renders the texture using OpenGL/GLX to the composite overlay window X server presents the rendered image from the Compositor through kernel mode settings

In this setup we have a few things which are not optimal for a fullscreen game: the roundtrips through Xserver-compositor and the possible delay added by the compositor. In such a setup the compositor will always

slow down the game as it performs vsync, etc.

Workarounds on X11

There is an existing solution to improve this which is known as “unredirection of full-screen windows”. The idea is that if there is a full screen window the compositor won’t run for it and the “normal” non-composited functionality of the X server is used.

In my opinion this is the wrong solution to the problem, because the Compositor is still running, it still gets damage events (from possibly other windows) and might start to composite the scene at any time again (e.g. a notification pops up as a override-redirect window).

In KWin/Plasma we have a better solution: blocking compositing. We can do that as we do not require compositing, other environments which require compositing can only use unredirection as best measurement. In fact we even have high-level API for games to tell us that they want to block compositing. It’s just one X atom, please use it.

This also explains why in KWin/Plasma the option to fullscreen unredirection is not enabled by default. It has drawbacks for a non-gaming usage, while we offer a better solution for games. It also explains why I don’t care at all about gaming benchmarks through the PTS as that in my opinion tests an invalid setup for us. If we cared about it, it would be easy to just ensure that the games used by PTS disable compositing.

Situation on Wayland

On Wayland the setup is better as we don’t have X11 in between. So a setup looks like the following:

Game renders through OpenGL/EGL Compositor gets notified through wl_surface damage Compositor directly presents the wl_buffer through KMS as it knows there is nothing else to see

So the situation is much improved in an ideal case. I need to point out that KWin doesn’t support this ideal case yet and still renders through OpenGL, but that’s where we are going to.

But I think there are still problems. Our Compositor still gets damage events from other windows, it gets woken up, etc. Running a game in a desktop environment means that there are other session processes which the game needs to share resources with. We want to have a PlayStation like setup: game everything, everyone else nothing. I don’t want KWin to take away important CPU/GPU time from the game.

Kernel Mode Settings in games

So what can we do? I thought about this and propose that we change gaming completely on Linux: remove the windowing system! Games should talk to kernel mode settings directly, games should interact with libinput directly. Let’s remove everything in between, we don’t need it, it only can worsen the gaming experience.

When a fullscreen game starts, it can create a “sub-session” on a new virtual terminal and become the logind- session controller for that session. This would allow the game to open the device files for rendering and for input just like a Wayland compositor does. Rendering could be done through EGL on top of DRM/GBM just like a Wayland compositor. The game would have full control over rendering, there is no desktop environment to slow it down any more. And it would have control over mode setting. Need a different resolution? No problem, just set it. On a desktop environment that’s always problematic (terrible on X11, better on Wayland). For games in windowed mode nothing should be changed, those should stay on the desktop environment.

Of course this would remove all interaction with the desktop environment. This is something which needs to be considered, like how to get Mumble to work in such a setup? Maybe the game could launch its own Wayland server?

That breaks Alt+Tab! Well not really. For one on X11 at least games often grab the keyboard, so Alt+Tab won’t work anyway. And of course one can still switch with ctrl+alt+f1 to the running session. Games should also have a common way to achieve this in my opinion.

There are certainly a few things which still need to be solved to get there, like how to start such a sub-session, how to return to the running session without needing to unlock the screen. The experience should be as good as on dedicated gaming console. So it’s still some work, but I think this is work well invested and better than trying to somehow make games work in Desktop Environments as that just cannot work as good as a dedicated gaming console.