[Pkg-electronics-devel] Bug#1057414: kicad: Please enable EGL support

[Sebastian Reichel]

Package: kicad
Version: 7.0.9+dfsg-1
Severity: normal

Dear Maintainer,

Without EGL, KiCAD experience on Wayland can be quite bad even when
using XWayland. At least on AMD GPU based systems, there are ~10 second
lags when switching between PCB and Schematics windows on two different
Wayland workspaces.

I've seen commit 5a3af461df6fc6e4be868399277ea4134e703773 ("Revert
"d/rules: Turn option KICAD_USE_EGL on" ), but I think it would be
better to enable EGL support in libglew, libwxwidgets and KiCAD
instead of disabling it everywhere.

At the moment GLX is used on XWayland and that is missing some
workarounds for SwapBuffers(). For EGL wxwidgets already has the
necessary code to disable vsync. See also upstream bugs:

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/issues/10235
https://github.com/wxWidgets/wxWidgets/issues/23512

I asked for the workaround to also be implemented for the GLX API,
but I believe it's a good idea to enable EGL in Debian even if that
happens.

P.S.: If anyone runs into the lag issue and finds this bug: You can
run KiCAD like this as a workaround: `vblank_mode=0 /usr/bin/kicad`.

Thanks,

-- Sebastian

-- System Information:
Debian Release: trixie/sid
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (500, 'testing'), (250, 'unstable'), (100, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386, armhf, arm64

Kernel: Linux 6.5.0-4-amd64 (SMP w/32 CPU threads; PREEMPT)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=en_US:en
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /usr/bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
LSM: AppArmor: enabled

Versions of packages kicad depends on:
ii  libc6                            2.37-12
ii  libcairo2                        1.18.0-1
ii  libcurl4                         8.4.0-2
ii  libfontconfig1                   2.14.2-6
ii  libfreetype6                     2.13.2+dfsg-1
ii  libgcc-s1                        13.2.0-7
ii  libgl1                           1.7.0-1
ii  libglew2.2                       2.2.0-4+b1
ii  libglib2.0-0                     2.78.1-4
ii  libglu1-mesa [libglu1]           9.0.2-1.1
ii  libgtk-3-0                       3.24.38-6
ii  libharfbuzz0b                    8.0.1-1
ii  libngspice0                      41+ds-1
ii  libocct-data-exchange-7.6        7.6.3+dfsg1-7
ii  libocct-foundation-7.6           7.6.3+dfsg1-7
ii  libocct-modeling-algorithms-7.6  7.6.3+dfsg1-7
ii  libocct-modeling-data-7.6        7.6.3+dfsg1-7
ii  libocct-ocaf-7.6                 7.6.3+dfsg1-7
ii  libodbc2                         2.3.12-1
ii  libpixman-1-0                    0.42.2-1
ii  libpython3.11                    3.11.6-3
ii  libstdc++6                       13.2.0-7
ii  libwxbase3.2-1                   3.2.4+dfsg-1
ii  libwxgtk-gl3.2-1                 3.2.4+dfsg-1
ii  libwxgtk3.2-1                    3.2.4+dfsg-1
ii  python3                          3.11.4-5+b1
ii  python3-wxgtk4.0                 4.2.1+dfsg-1
ii  zlib1g                           1:1.2.13.dfsg-3

Versions of packages kicad recommends:
pn  kicad-demos      <none>
ii  kicad-libraries  7.0.9+dfsg-1
ii  xsltproc         1.1.35-1

Versions of packages kicad suggests:
pn  extra-xdg-menus                                                     <none>
pn  kicad-doc-ca | kicad-doc-de | kicad-doc-en | kicad-doc-es | kicad-  <none>
    doc-fr | kicad-doc-id | kicad-doc-it | kicad-doc-ja | kicad-doc-pl
     | kicad-doc-ru | kicad-doc-zh
ii  kicad-packages3d                                                    7.0.9-1

-- no debconf information