The core and the headless tools no longer use mutexes, condition variables,
spinlocks, std::atomic, std::thread or volatile flags. Threads hand off through
libretro-common's retro_atomic and rthreads plus a few small pieces on top of
them in Common/Thread: Thread, MpscQueue, EventCounter, ParkingLot waits and
ReaderGate. Every wait blocks until it's woken; nothing polls on a timer.
State that only one thread touches just loses its lock. The PSP filesystem,
sceIo and the savedata dialog now belong to the emulation thread: async reads
and writes run when they're queued and complete later in emulated time, and
the IO and savedata threads are gone. The friend finder only talks to the
adhoc server and hands what it gets to the emulation thread. GPU init always
runs on the thread that starts the game.
The Vulkan render and compile queues, pipeline and render pass caches, delete
list and SPIR-V cache, the GL render queue, the software renderer's jit caches,
the file loader caches, the web debugger, UPnP, input, savestates, logging and
the GE debugger all hand off through queues and atomics. The IR jit's spinning
profiler thread goes.
A CPU thread with nothing to run now sleeps until work is queued instead of
spinning. Headless with --debugger waits for a client while stopped, and ends
the run once every client that connected has left. Web server shutdown keeps
servicing the CPU queue until the server has finished.
Deflate, zlib and gzip streams go through rinflate and rdeflate, zstd
through rzstd, CHD images through rchd, zip archives through
rzip_archive and PNG through rpng. The bundled libraries, their build
glue and the system-library options are gone; adler32 and uncompress
keep zlib's ABI for the prebuilt FFmpeg archives that still call them.
libretro-common is one CMake library that the core, the headless tool
and the unit tests all link.
The reads take shorter paths on the way. CHD decodes straight from the
loader's reads and a range of blocks at a time, and a file read at any
alignment decodes into place; CSO keeps one inflate stream instead of
one per block; a plain ISO serves a file read with one read of its exact
bytes; a stored zip member is read in place and a deflated one through
restart points rather than a copy of the whole image in memory; zip
members decode into the caller's buffer; sequential reads through the
frontend's VFS skip the seek, which also keeps its buffering.
libretro/test reads one image as ISO, CSO, CHD and zip through the block
devices, boots each, and checks the codecs against Python-made vectors;
a CI job runs it.