COSMIC apps utilise 40% of CPU.

[m1cha1s]

Hello, I am running Asahi linux, i have been trying out the cosmic-desktop package provided by this repo.

The desktop launches as it should, however when i start any program that uses libcosmic then these apps utilise 40-50% of CPU when they are interacted with in any way, even mouse movement over the window. There is also a bug in the cosmic-settings app that when you click around and then enter the Display section there is a constant 30-40% load on the CPU even without user interaction. This disappears when you click around a little bit and the enter the Display section again.

I believe that this may be related to software rendering within the wgpu library. Even thou Asahi supports both OpenGL and Vulkan.

[m1cha1s]

According to more findings, it seems to be related to COSMIC preferring the Vulkan/lavapipe renderer instead of the OpenGL one, this has been found by @jannau:fedora.im on Asahi Matrix. There are also some issues with the OpenGL backend, for example all images(icons) turn into black boxes, and also while launching cosmic-settings there is a lot of errors being spit out.

[jannau]

probably related: iced-rs/iced#2259
Production Asahi systems have no vulkan driver for the GPU. The driver is under development but not yet ready for production: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/merge_requests/30382

[mmstick]

As above, applications currently require Vulkan hardware support. If lacking, a LLVM software renderer is used instead.

[m1cha1s]

So this should be solved by the creation of the Vulkan driver for Asahi, right?

[mmstick]

Or when we update iced, which may have fixes to the wgpu renderer to use OpenGL instead.

[bbb651]

So this should be solved by the creation of the Vulkan driver for Asahi, right?

In case you don't know, there's one in the works.

I do think libcosmic should display some very visible warning, maybe a popup when you open the application, when lavapipe is used, in the vast majority of cases users have a way to get proper vulkan drivers set up but don't have them for whatever reason (such as outdated/missing drivers or mismatched userspace drivers and kernel drivers in a flatpak environment), and since most applications (like browsers) have a fallback, they are going to have a bad expirence and blame it on libcosmic or the applications. I've seen this happen a lot with Zed (iirc they are also working on an OpenGL fallback).