QQuickFramebufferObject render function on main thread

bart_janssens

Hi,

I just realised this is more related to Qt Quick, so reposting from
https://forum.qt.io/topic/70300/qmetaobject-invokemethod-with-qt-blockingqueuedconnection-from-render-thread

I have a QQuickFramebufferObject where I would like to call an external rendering function (written in Julia). Because Julia is not thread-safe, the rendering function must be called from the main thread. The easiest solution is to just set QSG_RENDER_LOOP to basic, but that is easy to forget and sub-optimal for other components in the scene graph.

Looking at the scene graph documentation, I thought it would have been possible to call back into the main thread using QMetaObject::invokeMethod with a Qt::BlockingQueuedConnection from within QQuickFramebufferObject::Renderer::render, but this seems to result in a deadlock. Using just a Qt::QueuedConnection doesn't work either, because then the rendering function gets called after the context is invalidated.

It seems that the GUI thread does not continue processing events until QQuickFramebufferObject::Renderer::render has completed, even though the docs state that the GUI thread is unblocked during render? The documentation for QQuickFramebufferObject even states: "Using queued connections or events for communication between item and renderer is also possible".

I have added a stand-alone test case here:
https://github.com/barche/render-threads

The problem is at line 18 in fborender.cpp:
https://github.com/barche/render-threads/blob/master/fborender.cpp#L18

Is the use of a Qt::BlockingQueuedConnection somehow disallowed here?

Cheers,

Bart