Now that the compositor can be started and stopped successfully, it's about time that it actually starts doing what it's designed to do: composite some stuff.

There are, generally speaking, two types of resources the compositor will render: contents of buffers owned by the compositor and contents of buffers owned by clients.

Client provided buffers are more complicated to handle in general. They must synchronize their buffers with the compositor so that it can render without screen tearing. Clients can also damage only part of their buffers to reduce the amount of redrawing per frame. Because of this complexity, clients will be dealt with in a later chapter.

Between different compositors the amount of compositor-owned buffers varies. For example, some compositors render their own background, status bars, and window decorations whilst others leave all that up to clients. Neither is more right or wrong than the other, but each leads to certain design trade-offs.

However, at least among desktop compositors, there is at least one compositor owned object they all generally have to render: the cursor.

As simple as that sounds, it's actually very complicated rendering a cursor correctly. Thankfully wlroots makes it much easier.

Suggested reading for an in-depth dive on how input handling works in wlroots.