3 ms·

Servo makes incredibly good use of the GPU. Being able to do that, and iterate so fast on that work, is part of what Rust brings to the table. (I don't think t

by jdub 10y ago

Servo makes incredibly good use of the GPU. Being able to do that, and iterate so fast on that work, is part of what Rust brings to the table. (I don't think they've swapped out the font renderer and image codecs yet, but there are quite a few bits and pieces they have swapped out as the Rust community delivers more pure Rust libraries.)

dingaling 10y ago
> Servo makes incredibly good use of the GPU. Too good, in fact: it won't run on any laptops that I own because their GPUs don't support a sufficient level of OpenGL. One great aspect of Firefox-with-Gecko is that you can throw it onto just about any machine with more than 512MB of RAM and it will provide bootstrap web access ( slow or otherwise ). That's going to be lost when everything is Servoised. I guess it's back to links2 at that point.
- eddyb 10y ago
  AFAIK that's not actually true, one option they have is going through Mesa's llvmpipe in such cases. EDIT: to be clear, with the Servo nightlies you need to do this yourself but Firefox could bundle it eventually.
- akiselev 10y ago
  How old are your laptops? For ease of development, webrender2 is configured to compile with the latest OpenGl 4.x features. I believe there is a way to build it to target a lower OpenGl version. Edit: Correction, its currently targeted at OpenGl 3.2. There's an open issue for bringing it down to OpenGl 3.1 which is the version supported by integrated Sandybridge GPUs. Considering 40% of people running Intel are using Sandybridge or older, that's probably why it wont run on your laptops.
  - dingaling 10y ago
    Youngest laptop here is from 2011: Intel Corporation Mobile GM965/GL960 Integrated Graphics Controller OpenGL renderer string: Mesa DRI Intel(R) 965GM Maximum OpenGL version for that chipset is 2.0, apparently, though I can't find a way to push it beyond 1.4 on Linux I appreciate that six years old is ancient by SV standards but I would be interested to learn what proportion of Firefox users are on equally old hardware. I did try launching Servo with CPU rendering but it hung indefinitely.
    - akiselev 10y ago
      Servo isn't a production ready consumer browser and it won't be for a long time because its purpose is to facilitate research into parallel browser engines. While a 2007 chipset may not be very old among the average consumer, it is probably not going to work for a developer machine that's going to be compiling a huge codebase under active development. I don't think the software fallback has gotten much love but AFAIK it'll work fine once llvmpipe support is added to webrender2 [1]. Once that is done, rendering will work with the vast majority of laptops and desktops running Linux/MacOS/Windows. The OpenGL version supported by that chipset is over a decade old so devoting time to compatibility this early in the project would be a waste of time (and defeat the purpose since the standard predates the explosion of mobile devices). [1] https://github.com/servo/servo/issues/13653 https://github.com/servo/servo/issues/13653

by jdub 10y ago

dingaling 10y ago

> Servo makes incredibly good use of the GPU. Too good, in fact: it won't run on any laptops that I own because their GPUs don't support a sufficient level of OpenGL. One great aspect of Firefox-with-Gecko is that you can throw it onto just about any machine with more than 512MB of RAM and it will provide bootstrap web access ( slow or otherwise ). That's going to be lost when everything is Servoised. I guess it's back to links2 at that point.

eddyb 10y ago
AFAIK that's not actually true, one option they have is going through Mesa's llvmpipe in such cases. EDIT: to be clear, with the Servo nightlies you need to do this yourself but Firefox could bundle it eventually.
akiselev 10y ago
How old are your laptops? For ease of development, webrender2 is configured to compile with the latest OpenGl 4.x features. I believe there is a way to build it to target a lower OpenGl version. Edit: Correction, its currently targeted at OpenGl 3.2. There's an open issue for bringing it down to OpenGl 3.1 which is the version supported by integrated Sandybridge GPUs. Considering 40% of people running Intel are using Sandybridge or older, that's probably why it wont run on your laptops.
- dingaling 10y ago
  Youngest laptop here is from 2011: Intel Corporation Mobile GM965/GL960 Integrated Graphics Controller OpenGL renderer string: Mesa DRI Intel(R) 965GM Maximum OpenGL version for that chipset is 2.0, apparently, though I can't find a way to push it beyond 1.4 on Linux I appreciate that six years old is ancient by SV standards but I would be interested to learn what proportion of Firefox users are on equally old hardware. I did try launching Servo with CPU rendering but it hung indefinitely.
  - akiselev 10y ago
    Servo isn't a production ready consumer browser and it won't be for a long time because its purpose is to facilitate research into parallel browser engines. While a 2007 chipset may not be very old among the average consumer, it is probably not going to work for a developer machine that's going to be compiling a huge codebase under active development. I don't think the software fallback has gotten much love but AFAIK it'll work fine once llvmpipe support is added to webrender2 [1]. Once that is done, rendering will work with the vast majority of laptops and desktops running Linux/MacOS/Windows. The OpenGL version supported by that chipset is over a decade old so devoting time to compatibility this early in the project would be a waste of time (and defeat the purpose since the standard predates the explosion of mobile devices). [1] https://github.com/servo/servo/issues/13653 https://github.com/servo/servo/issues/13653