LayersHistory.rst (2666B)
1 Layers History 2 ============== 3 4 This is an overview of the major events in the history of our Layers 5 infrastructure. 6 7 - iPhone released in July 2007 (Built on a toolkit called LayerKit) 8 9 - Core Animation (October 2007) LayerKit was publicly renamed to OS X 10 10.5 11 12 - Webkit CSS 3d transforms (July 2009) 13 14 - Original layers API (March 2010) Introduced the idea of a layer 15 manager that would composite. One of the first use cases for this was 16 hardware accelerated YUV conversion for video. 17 18 - Retained layers (July 7 2010 - Bug 564991) This was an important 19 concept that introduced the idea of persisting the layer content 20 across paints in gecko controlled buffers instead of just by the OS. 21 This introduced the concept of buffer rotation to deal with scrolling 22 instead of using the native scrolling APIs like ScrollWindowEx 23 24 - Layers IPC (July 2010 - Bug 570294) This introduced shadow layers and 25 edit lists and was originally done for e10s v1 26 27 - 3D transforms (September 2011 - Bug 505115) 28 29 - OMTC (December 2011 - Bug 711168) This was prototyped on OS X but 30 shipped first for Fennec 31 32 - Tiling v1 (April 2012 - Bug 739679) Originally done for Fennec. This 33 was done to avoid situations where we had to do a bunch of work for 34 scrolling a small amount. i.e. buffer rotation. It allowed us to have 35 a variety of interesting features like progressive painting and lower 36 resolution painting. 37 38 - C++ Async pan zoom controller (July 2012 - Bug 750974) The existing 39 APZ code was in Java for Fennec so this was reimplemented. 40 41 - Streaming WebGL Buffers (February 2013 - Bug 716859) Infrastructure 42 to allow OMTC WebGL and avoid the need to glFinish() every frame. 43 44 - Compositor API (April 2013 - Bug 825928) The planning for this 45 started around November 2012. Layers refactoring created a compositor 46 API that abstracted away the differences between the D3D vs OpenGL. 47 The main piece of API is DrawQuad. 48 49 - Tiling v2 (Mar 7 2014 - Bug 963073) Tiling for B2G. This work is 50 mainly porting tiled layers to new textures, implementing 51 double-buffered tiles and implementing a texture client pool, to be 52 used by tiled content clients. 53 54 A large motivation for the pool was the very slow performance of 55 allocating tiles because of the sync messages to the compositor. 56 57 The slow performance of allocating was directly addressed by bug 959089 58 which allowed us to allocate gralloc buffers without sync messages to 59 the compositor thread. 60 61 - B2G WebGL performance (May 2014 - Bug 1006957, 1001417, 1024144) This 62 work improved the synchronization mechanism between the compositor 63 and the producer.