The core no longer sleeps to pace itself: the frontend runs retro_run at
its own rate, so the frame throttle, the idle-vblank delay and the real
clock sync event (and its core option) are gone, and a stepping CPU hands
straight back instead of waiting 2 ms. Waits that polled now park on a
lock-free eventcount through Common/Thread/ParkingLot and are woken by
whoever changes the state: a paused GL emu thread, which also queues a
marker behind its last frame so pausing runs the render queue up to it
instead of polling; async I/O results; the software renderer when its
queue is full; Vulkan pipeline compiles; and debugger requests once
stepping ends. Boot joins the loader thread, cache shutdown joins its
read-ahead thread, and the slow-I/O simulation is removed.
The path browser, the HTTP and WebSocket servers, the Windows console and
the game info cache are left out of the core build. libretro/test gains
lrgltest, which drives the GL backend on a surfaceless EGL context through
every path that pauses or stops the emu thread; run.sh and the image
checks CI job run it on llvmpipe.
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.
libretroadmin