Show the develop frame itself, instead of a photocopy of it

The oldest open item in the project (ARCH §6.1, spike S1, AC-8). Every frame
in develop was read off the GPU into a `SharedPixelBuffer` and handed back to
Slint to upload again: ~7 ms at 4K against a 0.28 ms compute pass, 96% of the
frame spent carrying pixels to the CPU and back so they could be drawn where
they already were.

Slint 1.17 will adopt a `wgpu::Texture` directly, and the whole of what that
needs is arrangement rather than code.

**One device, made before the window.** A texture belongs to the device that
allocated it, so the compute passes and the compositor cannot each open their
own. `GpuContext::new_shared` opens one and hands back the instance and
adapter alongside it; `dr_ui::shared_gpu` gives all four to
`BackendSelector::require_wgpu_29(WGPUConfiguration::Manual { .. })`. That
call has to come before the first window, because creating one selects a
backend for you — which is why the GPU is now opened at the top of `run`
rather than two hundred lines down beside the other controllers.

dr-gpu still names no UI type. It hands out raw wgpu and does not ask who is
compositing (ARCH §6.5a).

**Vulkan only on the shared path**, where headless keeps its GL fallback.
wgpu's GL backend reaches its display through EGL at instance creation, and
before a window exists there is no display handle to give it — so a GL
instance cannot later produce the window surface Slint needs from it. A
machine with no Vulkan gets no shared device and browses without develop,
which is the same degradation as no adapter at all.

**`renderer-femtovg` becomes `renderer-femtovg-wgpu`.** The old one is FemtoVG
over OpenGL and cannot be handed a wgpu texture at all. It is not kept
alongside as a fallback: FemtoVG-over-GL has no branch for an imported
texture, falls through to "render this image into a buffer", gets nothing, and
draws nothing — a blank canvas with no error, which is worse than the failure
it would be papering over. The consequence is stated plainly in the manifest:
the desktop app now needs a working wgpu adapter to open a window.

**Two output textures, not one, and this is the part that is not obvious.**
Slint repaints when the image property *changes*, and it decides that with
`PartialEq` — which for two images over the same `wgpu::Texture` says
"unchanged". A pass that reused a single target would have rendered every
slider move correctly on the GPU and shown none of them: right, and invisible.
`AdjustPass` alternates between two targets, so consecutive frames are
genuinely different values. It also settles the read-while-write question that
one queue was already answering.

`RENDER_ATTACHMENT` is added to both render targets. Neither pass uses it;
Slint rejects an imported texture without it, on the reasoning that a
compositor handed a texture may need to draw into it.

**`AdjustPass::read_output` is deleted rather than gated.** It and
`export_pixels` were the same transfer under two names, and the comments
explaining why they were separate are the point of the whole criterion:
reading pixels back to *display* them is the defect, reading them back to
*encode a file* is the only way a file is made. The display twin is now gone
outright, which is stronger than a feature flag — it cannot be turned back on.
`export_pixels` is untouched and still ungated. The `readback` feature comes
off dr-ui, darkroom-desktop and darkroom-android; it stays in dr-gpu, where it
still gates `RenderTarget::read_pixels` and the segmentation field readback.
`examples/develop` moves to `export_pixels`, which is honest — it writes a
PPM — and so no longer needs the feature.

Four tests, each named for what it protects and each of which fails without a
screen if the property it guards breaks:

- the adjust target satisfies every condition Slint's import checks, asserted
  in the crate that owns the descriptor, because a descriptor that drifts
  fails at runtime on a real display and nothing else would notice;
- consecutive renders are different textures, and the third is the first
  again, so the alternation is a rotation and not an allocation per frame;
- the develop canvas has no CPU pixel buffer and does have a wgpu texture —
  AC-8 itself, in the terms Slint uses;
- consecutive frames compare unequal as `slint::Image`, which is the property
  the repaint actually depends on.

The zoom test's readback moves into the test module. It has to: there is no
library function that copies a displayed frame to the CPU any more, and that
is the point — the round-trip now exists in the test binary and nowhere a
shipping build can reach.

**What is not proven.** No GUI was run. What is verified is that the texture
satisfies the import contract, that the import succeeds, that the canvas is a
texture rather than a buffer, and that consecutive frames are distinguishable.
What is unverified is everything that needs a display: that Slint's FemtoVG
wgpu renderer adopts the Manual configuration on a real surface, that the
picture appears the right way up and the right colour, and the frame timing
that motivated the whole exercise. Android is untouched by testing — the
android backend routes a WGPU29 request to Skia, whose wgpu surface does
handle imported textures, but that is read from the source, not observed.

56 dr-gpu tests and 255 dr-ui tests pass, clippy clean under `-D warnings`,
fmt clean.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
This commit is contained in:
2026-08-17 09:54:00 +02:00
co-authored by Claude Opus 5
parent 2330ed25e9
commit cf8f5b632f
11 changed files with 555 additions and 142 deletions
+5 -5
View File
@@ -27,8 +27,8 @@ log.workspace = true
android_logger = "0.15"
[features]
# Mirrors darkroom-desktop: the CPU readback path stays on until spike S1
# lands zero-copy. On Adreno this is the same wrong path as on desktop, only
# with less memory bandwidth to absorb it (ARCH §6.1).
default = ["readback"]
readback = ["dr-ui/readback"]
# Mirrors darkroom-desktop: the CPU readback path is gone since S1 landed
# zero-copy. It mattered more here than on desktop — the same wrong path with
# far less memory bandwidth to absorb it (ARCH §6.1) — but it is untested on a
# device, since S1 was verified on desktop only.
default = []
+1 -3
View File
@@ -12,6 +12,4 @@ env_logger.workspace = true
log.workspace = true
[features]
default = ["readback"]
# Temporary CPU upload path until spike S1 lands zero-copy adoption.
readback = ["dr-ui/readback"]
default = []