Recently news went around about explicit sync being merged into Wayland protocols, and in the wake of that I saw a lot of people having questions about it, and why it was such a big deal… So here’s a short-ish explanation of what it is, why it’s needed and what the benefits are over the old model.

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Explicit sync is a new synchronization model that allows applications to explicitly tell relevant components when rendering is complete, avoiding accidental synchronizations and improving performance. It is a big deal because the proprietary NVidia driver and commonly used compositors do not support implicit sync, causing flickering and frame pacing issues on Wayland. With the implementation of explicit sync, these problems will be solved.