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>Now that Ubuntu ships with nouveau on default, maybe it's time to blacklist it in Chrome. I don't get this. All linux distros under the sun ship with nouveau,

>Now that Ubuntu ships with nouveau on default, maybe it's time to blacklist it in Chrome. I don't get this. All linux distros under the sun ship with nouveau, and always have. It is a kernel driver afterall. What else are they going to ship ?

amyjess 8y ago
The VESA driver?
- geofft 8y ago
  How does llvmpipe do these days? I remember being excited about it ~5 years ago and I can only imagine both LLVM performance and CPU speeds have gone up.
  - vetinari 8y ago
    llvmpipe is the gpu part, not the display part of the graphic card. Otherwise, when using it in KVM VM, it can run the desktop compositor quite nicely.
    - ajross 8y ago
      I didn't look at the bugs at issue, but I rather doubt mode switching is what Chromium cares about. It's sure to be video decode or GPU output.
    - geofft 8y ago
      But that's the part that's crashing. I'm suggesting Chrome use llvmpipe to do whatever they needed hardware acceleration for, generate a single boring texture on a single big rectangle, and pass that through to the graphics driver. That way Chrome itself isn't loading the Nouveau libGL and is much more insulated from incompatibilities between Chrome and Nouveau, whosever fault it might be.
      - jmgao 8y ago
        That's what swiftshader does.
        geofft 8y ago
        Whoa, I totally missed that! https://blog.chromium.org/2016/06/universal-rendering-with-swiftshader.html https://blog.chromium.org/2016/06/universal-rendering-with-s... So is it the case that you get decent (though perhaps not great) WebGL performance even if you have no GL-compatible graphics driver at all? Then are Nouveau users only losing performance and not functionality as a result of this Google decision?
      - loeg 8y ago
        WebGL requires far more than just blitting onto a single boring texture.
        geofft 8y ago
        That's why you go through llvmpipe - you use the Mesa OpeGL implementation in LLVM-JIT-accelerated but pure software mode to implement WebGL, get the results onto a texture, and pass that texture onto your actual graphics card. https://www.mesa3d.org/llvmpipe.html https://www.mesa3d.org/llvmpipe.html
        loeg 8y ago
        That seems like something you'd prefer not to do if your OpenGL driver wasn't broken.
haneefmubarak 8y ago
I think their point is that by default, even with the "use recommended drivers" option enabled, Ubuntu uses the nouveau driver by default instead of installing and using the NVIDIA driver.
- mempko 8y ago
  the nvidia driver is proprietary. If nvidia opens the source, maybe they would ship with that instead.
  - haneefmubarak 8y ago
    Well, installing recommended drivers on Ubuntu installs the Intel or AMD microcode, which is definitely proprietary, so I don't think that's a particularly reasonable argument. The NVIDIA driver is the driver that yields the best performance and experience; AFAICT the only reason it's not shipped by default is because the kernel is then considered "impure" or something (because source isn't available to debug issues in the NVIDIA driver), hence bugs can't be filed upstream for any issues in the kernel if the NVIDIA driver is installed. However, none of this is really the concern of the Chrome team. Their responsibility is to give the user the best experience, which they have defined as security, stability, and performance in that order. Since the nouveau driver is causing stability bugs, it's perfectly reasonable for them to fallback to software rendering and take the performance hit in order to preserve stability.
    - xzvnjp 8y ago
      > the kernel is then considered "impure" or something The term is "tainted".
nolok 8y ago
I think what they mean is "it's now enabled and used by default even for the clic clic clic through the menu (non technical) users", not that the driver is technically present.
monocasa 8y ago
> What else are they going to ship ? Including Nvidia's binary driver by default. Obvs Debian, gNewSense, and GUIX can't do that, but since when have corps cared about them? Like, don't get me wrong, I'm a FOSS or GTFO kind of guy, running Debian and Replicant, but shipping proprietary drivers by default is what chrome is hinting at obviously.
- bubblethink 8y ago
  Beyond the whole foss aspect, there are good technical reasons too. For instance, blob won't work with wayland (at least right now AFAIK), and ubuntu was (is) debating switching to wayland as default.
  - jandrese 8y ago
    My impression was that the 17.10 Weyland stuff was kind of a mess so the switch is probably premature at this point.
    - vetinari 8y ago
      Fedora is Wayland-by-default for several releases already.
      - loeg 8y ago
        Sort of. It falls back to X for drivers that don't support Wayland, which has included nvidia for a long time. (Maybe there is some progress there more recently.) And the proprietary nvidia driver is widely used.
        jolux 8y ago
        Does it really? I had grotesque lag when installing Fedora on a System76 laptop with an Nvidia card and had to switch to X manually.
      - jandrese 8y ago
zozbot123 8y ago
> What else are they going to ship ? That's not the point. The point is that it results in brokenness, and the easiest way to mitigate that for the bulk of non-technical users is to use software rendering instead (i.e. blacklist it). They're open to more refined solutions, but these will take some effort.

amyjess 8y ago

The VESA driver?

geofft 8y ago
How does llvmpipe do these days? I remember being excited about it ~5 years ago and I can only imagine both LLVM performance and CPU speeds have gone up.
- vetinari 8y ago
  llvmpipe is the gpu part, not the display part of the graphic card. Otherwise, when using it in KVM VM, it can run the desktop compositor quite nicely.
  - ajross 8y ago
    I didn't look at the bugs at issue, but I rather doubt mode switching is what Chromium cares about. It's sure to be video decode or GPU output.
  - geofft 8y ago
    But that's the part that's crashing. I'm suggesting Chrome use llvmpipe to do whatever they needed hardware acceleration for, generate a single boring texture on a single big rectangle, and pass that through to the graphics driver. That way Chrome itself isn't loading the Nouveau libGL and is much more insulated from incompatibilities between Chrome and Nouveau, whosever fault it might be.
    - jmgao 8y ago
      That's what swiftshader does.
      - geofft 8y ago
        Whoa, I totally missed that! https://blog.chromium.org/2016/06/universal-rendering-with-swiftshader.html https://blog.chromium.org/2016/06/universal-rendering-with-s... So is it the case that you get decent (though perhaps not great) WebGL performance even if you have no GL-compatible graphics driver at all? Then are Nouveau users only losing performance and not functionality as a result of this Google decision?
    - loeg 8y ago
      WebGL requires far more than just blitting onto a single boring texture.
      - geofft 8y ago
        That's why you go through llvmpipe - you use the Mesa OpeGL implementation in LLVM-JIT-accelerated but pure software mode to implement WebGL, get the results onto a texture, and pass that texture onto your actual graphics card. https://www.mesa3d.org/llvmpipe.html https://www.mesa3d.org/llvmpipe.html
        loeg 8y ago
        That seems like something you'd prefer not to do if your OpenGL driver wasn't broken.

haneefmubarak 8y ago

I think their point is that by default, even with the "use recommended drivers" option enabled, Ubuntu uses the nouveau driver by default instead of installing and using the NVIDIA driver.

mempko 8y ago
the nvidia driver is proprietary. If nvidia opens the source, maybe they would ship with that instead.
- haneefmubarak 8y ago
  Well, installing recommended drivers on Ubuntu installs the Intel or AMD microcode, which is definitely proprietary, so I don't think that's a particularly reasonable argument. The NVIDIA driver is the driver that yields the best performance and experience; AFAICT the only reason it's not shipped by default is because the kernel is then considered "impure" or something (because source isn't available to debug issues in the NVIDIA driver), hence bugs can't be filed upstream for any issues in the kernel if the NVIDIA driver is installed. However, none of this is really the concern of the Chrome team. Their responsibility is to give the user the best experience, which they have defined as security, stability, and performance in that order. Since the nouveau driver is causing stability bugs, it's perfectly reasonable for them to fallback to software rendering and take the performance hit in order to preserve stability.
  - xzvnjp 8y ago
    > the kernel is then considered "impure" or something The term is "tainted".

nolok 8y ago

I think what they mean is "it's now enabled and used by default even for the clic clic clic through the menu (non technical) users", not that the driver is technically present.

monocasa 8y ago

> What else are they going to ship ? Including Nvidia's binary driver by default. Obvs Debian, gNewSense, and GUIX can't do that, but since when have corps cared about them? Like, don't get me wrong, I'm a FOSS or GTFO kind of guy, running Debian and Replicant, but shipping proprietary drivers by default is what chrome is hinting at obviously.

bubblethink 8y ago
Beyond the whole foss aspect, there are good technical reasons too. For instance, blob won't work with wayland (at least right now AFAIK), and ubuntu was (is) debating switching to wayland as default.
- jandrese 8y ago
  My impression was that the 17.10 Weyland stuff was kind of a mess so the switch is probably premature at this point.
  - vetinari 8y ago
    Fedora is Wayland-by-default for several releases already.
    - loeg 8y ago
      Sort of. It falls back to X for drivers that don't support Wayland, which has included nvidia for a long time. (Maybe there is some progress there more recently.) And the proprietary nvidia driver is widely used.
      - jolux 8y ago
        Does it really? I had grotesque lag when installing Fedora on a System76 laptop with an Nvidia card and had to switch to X manually.
    - jandrese 8y ago

zozbot123 8y ago

> What else are they going to ship ? That's not the point. The point is that it results in brokenness, and the easiest way to mitigate that for the bulk of non-technical users is to use software rendering instead (i.e. blacklist it). They're open to more refined solutions, but these will take some effort.