Three root causes, all fixed and verified on the Pixel 9 Pro:
1. Present phase (backend + renderer): VSYNC_LOCKED_RENDER defers the
render to the vsync wake; RENDER_AHEAD presents the previous frame at
the start of render() (phase = wake + ~1.1 ms) and holds the new
frame one slot. Crash fix: a held wgpu frame must be PRESENTED, never
merely dropped, before the next acquire (AlreadyAcquired panic at
launch otherwise); discard_pending_frame presents too.
2. Full-res prefetch churn (src/lib.rs): the 8-slot full cache cycled
through a ~20-cell viewport forever (137 decodes/20 s) and each
eviction free()'d a 50 MB Vec on the UI thread (20-52 ms CPU spikes,
~7/s = the residual SLOWEV NonMain jank). Fix: 60 s tombstone
cooldown on evicted paths (idle prefetch skips, urgent tap bypasses)
+ off-thread reaper for the freed blobs (insert: 21 ms -> 4 us).
3. (earlier) Skia final flush + Mailbox present mode (vendor, M3).
Instrumentation (all behind --features perf): OTHR/INVK/INVK_TAG/FLCK
lines for cross-thread closure timing and push-site tagging.
Warm measured swipe, 8580-file grid: cadence median 8.33 ms (exact
120 Hz), p99 15.5 ms, 5/552 gaps >16.7 ms (0.9%, max 28.3 ms, zero
>33 ms); PRES phase median ~994 us, zero late frames. Docs updated
(docs/BUGS/scroll-jank-120hz.md, full scorecard + line reference).
Also: vendored i-slint-core + wgpu-hal (vkshim interposition patch),
vkshim profiling tooling, backend made a non-optional dep, debuggable
flag for simpleperf (REMOVE before shipping).
Greg Pomerantz
2f4768f354