Skip to content

2026-04-26-render-latency-followup.md

Latest commit

 

History

History
43 lines (34 loc) · 1.81 KB

2026-04-26-render-latency-followup.md

File metadata and controls

43 lines (34 loc) · 1.81 KB

Linux render-latency follow-up

This note mirrors the tracker updates from PR #65 and PR #68 after the Linux preview shipped.

What landed

  • PR #65 cached per-row StyledText text/runs in the preview renderer. Steady-state updates now rebuild VT-dirty rows plus cursor-affected rows instead of reconstructing the whole visible grid every tick.
  • PR #68 changed Linux PTY output to wake the terminal view directly. The workspace idle poll is no longer the intended wake path for normal shell output.
  • Shared CON_GHOSTTY_PROFILE instrumentation now logs vt_snapshot timing for Linux and Windows through the same path.
  • The final Linux stale-screen regression after exiting htop / vim was fixed by treating each new VT generation as a visible-row cache refresh boundary in the Linux preview renderer, while row containers still clear across the full pane width.

Tracker status

The current Linux preview renderer is now suitable for near-term runtime testing, but it is still the temporary GPUI StyledText row renderer. The long-term renderer remains a GPUI-owned glyph-atlas grid renderer so Linux can avoid layout-time shaping as the hot path and match the fixed cell-grid architecture used by the Windows D3D11/DirectWrite renderer.

Native Linux performance smoke should continue to cover:

  • ls / large command-output bursts
  • htop and nvim alternate-screen enter/exit
  • row clearing after TUI exit
  • Wayland and X11 desktop sessions, especially hardware-accelerated KDE and GNOME

Remaining work

  • Linux glyph-atlas grid renderer.
  • Mouse reporting, selection, scrollback gestures, and clipboard polish.
  • Native desktop validation across major Wayland/X11 environments.
  • Native package format decision (.deb, AppImage, Flatpak, etc.) on top of the existing tarball + one-line installer path.