pygfx
Problems with creating a surface
We're seeing several reports where people have issues related to wgpu creating a surface. I created this as a meta-issue.
Issues in wgpu-py / rendercanvas / pygfx
- https://github.com/pygfx/pygfx/issues/642
- https://github.com/pygfx/wgpu-py/issues/663
- https://github.com/pygfx/rendercanvas/issues/62
- https://github.com/pygfx/rendercanvas/issues/55
- https://github.com/pygfx/pygfx/issues/951
Known upstream issues
TODO
Improvements made
- https://github.com/pygfx/rendercanvas/pull/73
- https://github.com/pygfx/wgpu-py/pull/705
Specific cases
Linux
Make sure you've done
sudo apt install mesa-vulkan-drivers
sudo apt install xserver-xorg-core libvulkan1
WSL
wgpu does not really work on WSL yet, see https://github.com/gfx-rs/wgpu/issues/1443. I think you can use a limited subset with the OpenGL backend.
Qt subwidgets
Qt does not like it when we claim a widget as a native widget, and this can cause some nasty side-effects. I think the best solution is a bitmap-present, maybe combined with an QGLWidget.
Wayland
The glfw GUI backend works via the x11 compat layer. But other backends don't work because the display id cannot be obtained. With the Qt backend it automatically fall back to bitmap on wayland.
Solutions
Using the bitmap mode
The simples approach (and one that we can control) is the present_method="bitmap" in rendercanvas. It does suffer a performance penalty, but we already know how we can reduce that penalty: https://github.com/pygfx/rendercanvas/issues/66
Solutions to actually allow rendering to a surface
Wait 🤷 Except for the specific cases above, wgpu-core will likely improve on this front.
Maybe some tricks can be read in https://github.com/gfx-rs/wgpu/issues
there was a release upstream with one Bugfix that sounds similar https://github.com/gfx-rs/wgpu/releases/tag/v24.0.3
Yeah, "Fix drop order in Surface, solving segfaults on exit on some systems." sounds very familiar to https://github.com/pygfx/pygfx/issues/642. I think wgpu-native can bump without much work. So we can get this in wgpu-py pretty quick.