Commit Graph
4 Commits
Author SHA1 Message Date
ChuckBuildsandClaude Opus 5 571cc6fdac fix(scroll,cache): resolve CodeRabbit review on #523
Eight findings, all reproduced before fixing.

scroll_config.configure() read the refresh rate *after* resolve() had
already used it. resolve() fills in target_fps, pixels_per_frame and the
judder warning from that rate, so on a 60Hz panel every one of them
described 100Hz -- and with snap_to_crisp=False nothing downstream
corrected it, so set_target_fps() paced the helper to 100 FPS. The rate
is now settled first, and falls back to the global config rather than
straight to the default.

refresh_hz_from_config() used `(cfg.get("display") or {}).get(...)`,
which raises AttributeError when either level is truthy but not a
mapping -- out of a function whose whole contract is a rate or a default.

The frame-stats line reported the upper-middle sample as the median and
the 96th sorted sample as p95 of 100. Both are also thresholds (stalls
at 1.5x the median, skips at 0.5x), so the counts were biased too. The
arithmetic is now in frame_stats()/format_frame_stats(), testable
without a clock.

configure()'s docstring and docs/SCROLL_PERFORMANCE.md still said it
applies the frame hold and warns when it cannot. It deliberately does
neither since "tie the frame hold to the scroll, not the plugin"; a
caller following the old text would omit set_scrolling_state() and slow
snapped speeds would still present every refresh.

disk_cache had no policy for non-finite floats: orjson writes null,
the stdlib writes NaN/Infinity, and orjson then rejects those legacy
files so DiskCache.get deleted them as corrupt. One behaviour on both
paths now -- write null, keep legacy records readable. allow_nan=False
detects the values; the replacement walk runs only when there is one,
so the ordinary write path is byte-identical and pays nothing.

build_rgbmatrix_nogil.sh picked the build artifact with a glob piped to
`head -1`, which sorts cpython-311 ahead of cpython-313, so a stale .so
staged in from the source tree was installed as core.so while the GIL
check -- which reads the generated core.cpp, not the .so -- still passed.
It now requires the current interpreter's exact ABI name and fails
closed. Its systemctl calls were also unchecked under `set -uo pipefail`:
a failed stop left the old service running, the following start
succeeded as a no-op, and the health check reported SUCCESS for a
binding that was never loaded.

orjson floor raised to 3.11.6 for CVE-2025-67221 (unbounded recursion
in dumps); it covers the project's Python 3.10-3.13 range.

Adds test/test_cache_nonfinite_floats.py (14) plus regression tests in
test_scroll_config.py and test_scroll_helper.py. 9 of the cache tests
and 9 of the scroll_config tests fail against the pre-fix code.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_014RRtqXDCnvnY6EQwhT5CV9
2026-09-06 17:43:30 -04:00
ChuckandClaude Opus 5 2622c15265 fix(scroll): tie the frame hold to the scroll, not the plugin
The hold applied in configure() never reached the panel. Plugins share one
display manager, and set_scrolling_state(False) -- fired whenever ANY other
plugin finishes its scroll -- reset the hold to 1. A hold set once at plugin
construction was therefore always gone by the time that plugin rendered.

The symptom was a log line that lied. ledmatrix-stocks reported

    Scroll configured: 50.0 px/s (1px every 2 refreshes = 50.0 fps, smooth)

while the panel measured 100.0 fps, median 10.00ms. Config, resolution and
snapping were all correct; only the pacing silently was not applied.

set_scrolling_state(is_scrolling, frame_hold=1) now carries it, so the hold
lives exactly as long as the scroll that asked for it. configure() reports the
value as ScrollSettings.frame_hold instead of applying it -- applying it behind
the caller's back could never have been right on a shared display manager.
Existing callers are unaffected; the default keeps one frame per refresh.

Verified on hardware: stocks at 50 px/s now measures

    50.0 fps over 251 frames | median 20.00ms p95 20.09ms | stalls 0 skips 0

20.00ms being exactly two refreshes, with the panel still refreshing at 100Hz
underneath so flicker is unchanged.

test_another_plugin_stopping_does_not_strand_a_hold pins the interaction that
broke this.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-04 18:17:02 -04:00
ChuckandClaude Opus 5 6e8a9dd24b feat(scroll): let users pick a crisp speed for their own panel
Whole-pixel motion was previously only available at multiples of the refresh
rate -- 100, 200, 300 px/s on a 100Hz panel. 100 px/s crosses a 256px panel in
2.6s, which is brisk for reading, and everything slower had to blend (blur) or
repeat frames unevenly (judder). There was no way to ask for 50 px/s and get
clean motion.

SwapOnVSync takes a framerate_fraction the display manager never passed. It
holds each frame for N panel refreshes; the panel keeps refreshing at its full
rate throughout, so holding costs nothing in flicker and only changes how often
a NEW image is presented. That turns 50 px/s into one whole pixel every second
refresh instead of half a pixel every refresh.

The crisp speeds are therefore refresh_hz / hold * pixels_per_frame, and that
ladder depends on the panel: a Pi Zero on a long chain has a different set of
good speeds from a Pi 4 on a short one. crisp_ladder() enumerates them and
solve_crisp() picks the best match for a requested speed.

solve_crisp weights motion quality rather than picking the numerically nearest
entry, which matters more than it sounds. Asked for 30 px/s, nearest-by-value
answers 28.6 -- 2px jumps at 14fps -- over 33.3, which is single-pixel motion
at 33fps and obviously better on the panel. The target is also clamped into the
ladder's range first, because relative error saturates near 1.0 for a target
far outside it and the quality penalty would otherwise answer "10000 px/s" with
the slowest entry.

configure() snaps to the ladder and applies the hold when given a display
manager. Without one the hold silently cannot happen and motion falls back to
fractional pixels, so it warns rather than failing quietly. set_frame_hold()
resets to 1 when scrolling stops, so one plugin's pacing cannot leak into
whatever is on screen next.

scripts/scroll_speeds.py is the user-facing part: it prints the ladder for the
configured rate, measures what the panel ACTUALLY manages (--measure, for
hardware that cannot reach its configured limit), highlights the nearest option
to a wanted speed, and demos one live. It never starts or stops the display
service itself -- doing that inside a script stranded the panel twice today.

Speeds below ~20 px/s remain stepped regardless. That is the pixel pitch, not a
software limit.

Also fixes the dirty-tracking test spy, which stubbed SwapOnVSync with a
single-argument function and would have masked the new call as a failed push,
and rewrites a configure() test that had started passing for the wrong reason:
it asserted a judder warning, which snapping now prevents, and was matching the
unrelated "hold could not be applied" warning instead.

183 tests pass on the Pi.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-04 16:32:52 -04:00
ChuckandClaude Opus 5 7b4b07e313 perf(scroll): pace frames to the panel, not to a fixed sleep
Scrolling ran at 44-46 fps on a 2x128x64 chain and 14-17% of frames took
41-53ms, which reads as judder. Four independent causes, each measured on
the hardware; details and the diagnostic recipe are in
docs/SCROLL_PERFORMANCE.md.

The high-FPS loop slept a flat 8ms after every render. display() has
already blocked on the panel's vsync by then, so that sleep was added to a
wait that had happened: ~4ms of render plus 8ms put each iteration at ~12ms
against a 10ms refresh grid, so every swap missed a refresh and the loop
settled at 50fps while asking for 125 -- with no headroom, so a further
14% of frames slipped again. It now sleeps only the remainder, with a 1ms
floor so plugin threads still get the GIL.

ScrollHelper stepped position on a wall clock at 1/scroll_delay steps per
second. Plugins set scroll_delay to the frame period, so that comparison
sat exactly on its own threshold: a frame arriving a hair early moved zero
pixels and rendered an identical frame, dirty-tracking skipped the swap, it
returned in ~2ms, and the beat repeated. No scroll_delay value tunes that
out -- a shorter delay trades stalled frames for periodic double-steps.
Both modes now accumulate elapsed time at the same configured speed, so
position stays proportional to real time.

Sub-pixel blending goes back to off by default. It renders a half-step by
mixing two adjacent columns, which on a coarse panel showing pixel-font
text alternates crisp and smeared frames and reads as shimmer -- visibly
worse than integer stepping on the hardware. Vegas mode still opts in.

disk_cache uses orjson when importable, falling back to the stdlib. Encoding
a ~1MB record drops from 14.8ms to 5.4ms end-to-end, and that work holds the
GIL while a marquee is on screen. display_manager also checksummed the whole
framebuffer twice per frame (dirty tracking, then the preview snapshot); the
snapshot now takes the checksum the caller already computed.

New src/common/scroll_config.py resolves scroll settings in one place. Five
ticker plugins each hand-rolled this and disagreed: odds-ticker ranked the
deprecated scroll_pixels_per_second above the documented scroll_speed/delay
pair, and because that key carries a schema default the documented settings
were dead for every user (ChuckBuilds/ledmatrix-plugins#408), while
ledmatrix-leaderboard read the same key only as a fallback. The resolver also
warns when a speed will not advance a whole number of pixels per refresh,
which is the property that actually determines whether a scroll looks smooth.

scripts/build_rgbmatrix_nogil.sh rebuilds the rgbmatrix binding so it
releases the GIL. Upstream declares SwapOnVSync without nogil, unlike
SetPixel/Clear/Fill beside it, so the render thread held the GIL for the
whole vsync wait and starved background threads into long uninterruptible
bursts. The script patches, builds and self-verifies into a scratch tree;
--install backs up the original and rolls back if the service does not come
back healthy.

Measured after: 100 fps locked, no stalls observed, render thread down from
51% to 19% of one core.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-03 17:45:45 -04:00