1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
|
Tips and pointers (*berylhackingtips):
* A very small portion of beryl is the actual OpenGL magic, most of working
with plugins is manipulating the main data structures (CompScreen,
CompWindow) and working with Callbacks, core is a different beast.
Appropriate data structures are more important than impressive algorithms!
* IPCS can be used for communication between plugins see
beryl-core/src/ipcs.c and Cube/Rotate for good examples. Avoid use of this
however as it is both slow and ties plugins together in ways you may not
wish.
* Premature optimization is the root of all evil, profile before needlessly
wasting time on optimization. To profile beryl you can compile with -pg
(CFLAGS="-pg" ./configure; make; blabla) and when beryl exits it drops a
'gmon.out' in it's working directory. From that directory run gprof
/path/to/beryl/executable > berylprof, and you can view the profile in a
text editor, or a profile tool such as kprof (highly recommended).
* WRAP/UNWRAP works a bit like a stack of sorts, examine a backtrace from gdb
to make things clear. This is relatively inflexible and ideas for
improvement post 0.2.0 are welcome.
* Beryl can be debugged without crashing your system, compile with debugging
symbols (-g) and run in a tty with gdb beryl, set breakpoints with 'break
function' run with 'run' when X freezes because of the break use
alt+sysrq+r then ctrl+alt+f1 to get to the tty, examine things, and
continue execution.
* Tieing things whether it be plugins, settings/core, or settings/an
individual plugin is bad and should be avoided. 'Write (programs) to do one
thing and do it well'.
* As a rule avoid pixel shaders as they aren't exposed by AIGLX as of
current. Ala water.
* Plugins should work within core, at the same time changes to core can be
made to accomadate a specific feature such as transparent cube.
TODO:
* Optimizations are always welcome, benchmark isn't horribly accurate but if
you consistently notice a ~10-20 FPS improvement, or a decrease in lag
spikes , or something that's not '1 FPS more when rotating cube left' go
ahead and commit it, worst case is it's reverted. Things to look at:
Switcher, particle system in animation, input enabled zoom.
* A keybinding to replace windows (run through placement algorithm again)
would be an easy to implement and useful feature. Bonus points if the
windows fly to their new positions.
* Comment code! not only does this help everyone in their tasks it helps you
learn the codebase, pretty easy to do.
* Allow annotate to draw directly on to the window texture. This would involve
procing drawWindowTexture as in beryl-plugins/src/neg.c and binding an
opengl rendering context to the windows GLXPixmap, beyond that it's pretty
similar to the rest of annotate.
* Improve plugin short descriptions, maybe make long descriptions a bit more
wordy as well as they are being moved to tooltips.
* Anyway to speed up IPCS?
* Refactor some of the code in place, it's spaghetti code as it stands.
* Exempt specific windows from window decorations as part of the emerald menu.
Remember this setting for windows? look at all kwin has for stuff like this,
duplicating a small amount would be nice.
* Contribute to I18N
* Work on kberylsettings the PyQT settings manager in branches.
* Add CompOptionFont to settings
* Look for functions that can be inlined. use __attribute__((always_inline)) to
force the inline even without -finline-functions
* Look at using LIKELY/UNLIKELY macros for if/else statements in tight loops
with a high discrimination towards one or the other. Profile to find such
areas, premature optimization is bad.
* Participate in discussion and planning on IRC, it's invaluable. Make yourself
a part of the beryl development community rather than a lone wolf.
* Take lengthy discussions on the mailinglist.
* Add more code documentation in Documentation/ about interfaces used by Beryl.
* Look in Documentation/TODO-Multiscreen for multiscreen bugs to fix during
0.3.x
* Add more stuff here!
|
