32 ms·

Firefox 75 on Wayland now to have full WebGL, working VA-API acceleration

328 points by nirv 7y ago

new_realist 7y ago
Does this work on Gnome i.e. with official Nvidia drivers?
- sprash 7y ago
  At this point Wayland is nothing more than a 10 year old, over-hyped, tech-demo. Why should Nvidia care about sub 1% of a sub 1% market?
  - sterwill 7y ago
    I use Wayland with GNOME all day every day and it works fine. There are still minor issues versus legacy X, but it's certainly more than a "tech-demo".
    - dsego 7y ago
      Is it finally possible to share the screen on a video conference call?
      - jhoward321 7y ago
        Unless it's changed in the last month or so, no.
        tpopela 7y ago
        Exactly nothing changed last month, because it works for quite some time. See https://jgrulich.cz/2018/07/02/screen-sharing-support-in-webrtc-for-wayland-sessions/ https://jgrulich.cz/2018/07/02/screen-sharing-support-in-web... and https://jgrulich.cz/2018/07/04/how-to-enable-and-use-screen-sharing-on-wayland/ https://jgrulich.cz/2018/07/04/how-to-enable-and-use-screen-... and https://twitter.com/tomaspopela/status/1105740090784006144 https://twitter.com/tomaspopela/status/1105740090784006144. Also we are currently working on some improvements to improve the UX - https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/c/chromium/src/+/1942327/ https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/c/chromium/src/+/19...
      - fourmyle 7y ago
        I use Sway but what I do is use Google Hangouts in Chromium (Xwayland) instead of Firefox (Wayland) when I want to screen share. I heard Zoom doesn't work yet though.
      - Polylactic_acid 7y ago
        If the software supports it, yes. Most commercial programs have not been updated to support it yet but the feature is there.
        deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
    - snarfy 7y ago
      Does VNC or RDP work now? That's what is keeping me back.
      - any1 7y ago
        Yes, both Gnome and Sway have VNC: https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/Mutter/RemoteDesktop https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/Mutter/RemoteDesktop, https://github.com/any1/wayvnc https://github.com/any1/wayvnc. Weston has RDP, and there are efforts being made to also add VNC.
      - sterwill 7y ago
        I don't need VNC or RDP, so I don't know. I know that sharing other windows or my whole desktop in Google Hangouts doesn't work, but I rarely need that. I figure I'll log back in with an X session if I need that.
  - bitwize 7y ago
    Anybody with any sort of graphical expertise on Linux with the exception of Keith Packard is working on Wayland, not X. Wayland is still the future.
  - oehtXRwMkIs 7y ago
    Seems like an out of touch opinion, I'm using sway and very satisfied with it.
    - jsjddbbwj 7y ago
      If you use sway (an i3 clone), how can you say something is out of touch? If anything your use case is absolutely in the minority
      - jniedrauer 7y ago
        Sway is a pretty popular project, and gaining momentum. I also use sway for all of my machines (including workstation and personal laptop) and am quite happy with it.
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
      Someone who uses their GUI as the worlds most over-engineered tmux session should be careful about calling others "out of touch".
  - DCKing 7y ago
    This is a strange opinion to express in general, but really strange on this news. Linux hasn't had hardware video acceleration in a browser for over a decade when Windows and macOS did have it, precisely because it was too hard to support this use case within the restrictions of X11. The buffer sharing trickery, combined with having to render web pages and a browser around it, was just too hard to solve for years (within the limited attention X11 based desktops get in general). Linux finally has a graphics stack on which this isn't as much of a problem, and it's received enough adoption that Firefox is now making changes for it. And on that news you decide to comment that Wayland is a tech demo? This news should tell you it's completely the opposite! Wayland seems to be finally delivering.
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
      Parent is kinda right. Wayland was supposed to be this great next-gen display protocol for Linux, finally doing away with the cruft of X and thereby making development faster and easier while bringing modern features and yadda yadda. Instead it has taken 10 years to kinda-sorta catch up to X and is still behind its equivalents on Win/Mac.
      - DCKing 7y ago
        Wayland has a lot of problems, but they're adoption problems. 1) Wayland isn't a replacement for all of X.org. It's a replacement for much of X11, the protocol. "Wayland is just a protocol" - there's no wayland binary on your computer like there is an xorg binary. All the problems/limitations people commonly perceive with Wayland are actually problems/limitations within Wayland implementations like Mutter (Gnome) or KWin (KDE) and lacking application support. There's really not that much that "Wayland" as a project could deliver as it's just a protocol [1]! 2) Replacing something like your entire graphics stack requires a widespread, coordinated effort to unify the various Linux distro's under it. That widespread coordinated effort is not actually possible in the (by "design") extremely fragmented Linux market. The only approach is to slowly let Wayland implementations evolve, and there we have it. Hot take: Wayland will not fully replace X11 the coming 10 years. There is no fundamental solution to the two problems above. Many popular desktops (Xfce, Cinnamon) have no plan to support Wayland at all. Some don't even want to. In the future, there will be choices for graphics stacks on Linux leading to further fragmentation. [1]: The projects that should deliver here are: Gnome, KDE, other open source desktops. Although I think using Gnome with Wayland is superior in many ways to X11, it still has certain quite major shortcomings. It's also application toolkits: Qt and Gtk work luckily, but Electron is waiting for some Chrome renovations before supporting Wayland, and then there's stuff like Wine and Java where the refactor/reward balance simply doesn't favor them. And sometimes applications have to be updated to stop relying on using hardcoded X11 stuff, and use agnostic Gtk/Qt/Freedesktop functionality. There's a lot of history with X11 that we have to move away from, and the incentives and coordination only allow for slow movement.
- nirv 7y ago
  Well, the simple answer is: not likely. In order to run Firefox under Wayland, you have to be able to run Wayland session in your compositor (Clutter in case of Gnome). AFAIK, currently no compositor has working/stable Wayland support with NVidia proprietary drivers due to GBM/EGLStreams thing[1]. At the same time, open-source Nvidia driver Nouveau is in a terribly poor condition. Which, hopefully, may change soon[2][3]. Thus, if system is running off the Nvidia graphics card with proprietary drivers, there's no way to use Gnome Wayland session and Firefox 75 acceleration at the moment [corrected and specified]. Please correct me, if I'm wrong. A separate case is where the system uses Intel/AMD graphics card and drivers, and NVidia is used for render offloading (Optimus/PRIME/Bumblebee). This may be a laptop with discrete GPU or Virtual Machine setup with GPU passthrough. Since I don't have such a setup, I can't check if it works with Firefox 75 [corrected]. But there're some discussions[4] on the matter and experimental works on implementing NVIDIA VDPAU-VAAPI wrapper[5]. [1] https://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2019/04/03/preparing-for-fedora-workstation-30/ https://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2019/04/03/preparing-for-fedo... [2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2019/12/06/nvidia-is-prepping-an-unexpected-surprise-for-linux-users-in-2020/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2019/12/06/nvidi... [3] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NVIDIA-Open-Source-GTC-20 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NVIDIA-O... [4] https://old.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/a94zzj/state_of_wayland_and_hybrid_graphics/ https://old.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/a94zzj/state_of_... [5] https://packages.debian.org/stretch/vdpau-va-driver https://packages.debian.org/stretch/vdpau-va-driver
  - danieldk 7y ago
    Moral of the story: do not buy NVIDIA, except if you need it for e.g. CUDA. My previous machine had an NVIDIA GPU and despite all the great work, nouveau was almost unworkably buggy. The proprietary NVIDIA drivers did not work with Wayland at all. I bought an AMD card, Wayland worked with open source drivers and everything was butter-smooth. I now use a NUC with an Intel GPU. Similarly to ADM GPUs, it works great with open source drivers.
    - nirv 7y ago
      Yeah, sorta-kinda. If only AMD would be able to compete timely in the higher end GPU segment. It took AMD 2+ years to release Radeon RX 5700 XT (Jul 2019)† to match (with a very good stretch) Nvidia GTX 1080 TI (Mar 2017). I support AMD and Intel for their open-source efforts, but still hold hopes for GTC 2020 announces. † AMD Radeon VII was super overpriced and unavailable in my area, and it still released nearly two years later.
- diafygi 7y ago
  I believe that's tracked in Bug 1210729, which is included in the overall hardware video playback tracking Bug 1210726. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1210729 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1210729 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1210726 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1210726
diafygi 7y ago
Relevant comment for X11: > (In reply to lilydjwg from comment #30) >> I'm glad to here that, but what about support for Firefox on X11? Is it given up? > Hardware decoding is platform independent so it generally works under X11 as it's implemented as Bug 1616185. > For whole playback chain see Bug 1610199 what's needed to be done fox X11. > I was closing this one as it refers to HW decode only, not the playback. > The overall video playback is tracked at Bug 1210726. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1210727#c31 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1210727#c31
miguelmota 7y ago
As a regular linux user should I switch to wayland from xorg? will I notice performance improvements?
- mcovey 7y ago
  As a regular linux user, no, don't worry about whether you're using wayland or xorg, just use whatever comes with your distro. Let the maintainers worry about those things and just be a user.
- danieldk 7y ago
  Upsides: more secure (in X.org every client can read every other client's keystrokes, pointer position, and do screen grabs), generally smoother rendering, better support for mixed-DPI setups. Current downsides: worse support for screen recording/sharing (e.g. not supported in Skype), a bug in the compositor (e.g. GNOME Mutter) can bring your whole session down, not-as-good NVIDIA support (also depending on the compositor). I have been using Wayland for two years or so an wouldn't want to go back. I do miss wide screen sharing support, because I am working remotely and Skype is the primary means of communication.
  - jchw 7y ago
    Isn’t modern Skype using WebRTC that would be supported at least in beta with xdg-desktop-portal?
  - tsar9x 7y ago
    Did you try to use WebRTC PipeWire for screen sharing?
    - danieldk 7y ago
      Yes, it works with some applications, like Jitsi. No luck with Skype so far.
  - TacticalCoder 7y ago
    Haven't switched yet. Under Wayland, can users which are not owning the session display an app on the Wayland session/server? (e.g. under X I can do something like "xhost +" and then have any user display an app on the X server). I'm not asking about the security implications of doing that under X (as you already mentioned, X is less secure and an app can read another app's screen content etc.): just if it's doable or not under Wayland?
ambrop7 7y ago
The mention of DMA-BUF makes me suspect that it involves rendered video being copied from the GPU to the main RAM and back to the GPU, which wastes energy. Does someone have details about how the integration works?
- amluto 7y ago
  The linked blog post makes it reasonably clear that this isn’t happening. https://mastransky.wordpress.com/2020/03/03/webgl-and-fgx-acceleration-on-wayland/ https://mastransky.wordpress.com/2020/03/03/webgl-and-fgx-ac...
- cycloptic 7y ago
  It's the opposite. The point of using DMA-BUFs is that those are the handles which are passed around, and the data never leaves GPU memory. The handles can be directly accessed from EGL/Vulkan and used as render source/targets.
  - ambrop7 7y ago
    This is quite unclear to me. Is DMA-BUF so generic that the memory it refers to can be in different types of RAM, including GPU RAM and CPU RAM?
    - jdashg 7y ago
      Yes.
    - floatboth 7y ago
      That is the whole point, one of the original use cases was passing around buffers between different GPUs on dual-graphics laptops (PRIME)
      - ambrop7 7y ago
        Do you maybe know, when frames rendered by GPU 1 (e.g. fast GPU) need to be sent to GPU 2 (e.g. slow GPU doing the compositing and outputting to the monitor), how does the data actually get transferred? I can imagine the following possibilities: 1) GPU 1 writes to CPU RAM, GPU 2 reads from CPU RAM 2) GPU 1 writes to GPU 2 RAM via PCI Express (DMA between devices) 3) GPU 2 reads from GPU 1 RAM via PCI Express (DMA between devices)
shmerl 7y ago
What's missing so far is VAAPI support for WebRTC. Apparently, Firefox is using same libwebrtc as Chrome does, and it still doesn't support hardware acceleration. This results in some ugly behavior of WebEx for instance, which blocks video in its WebRTC calls, since it assumes that "CPU is too weak" to handle it. Cisco never fixed this issue.
dzonga 7y ago
for linux users, this is the best Firefox news in a loooong long time. having to copy paste links from youtube to smplayer for mpv hardware accelerated video can be a PITA.
EricRiese 7y ago
There's a $380 bounty for this [1]. If you fixed this, please collect this. You deserve it. I hope this doesn't get lost just because it got fixed in a different ticket number. [1] https://www.bountysource.com/issues/55506502-add-va-api-hardware-decoding-support-on-linux https://www.bountysource.com/issues/55506502-add-va-api-hard...
- abrowne 7y ago
  That's not a bad "tip", but keep in mind the person who worked on this (Martin Stránský) is employed by Red Hat to "work on mozilla packages (Firefox, Seamonkey, Thunderbird) in Fedora and Red Hat."¹ 1: https://people.redhat.com/stransky/ https://people.redhat.com/stransky/
  - thayne 7y ago
    Assuming he worked on it on company time, wouldn't that mean Red Hat could collect it?
sitzkrieg 7y ago
does this mean playing video will not use half of cpu available (at best) constantly on linux now?

328 points by nirv 7y ago

new_realist 7y ago

Does this work on Gnome i.e. with official Nvidia drivers?

sprash 7y ago
At this point Wayland is nothing more than a 10 year old, over-hyped, tech-demo. Why should Nvidia care about sub 1% of a sub 1% market?
- sterwill 7y ago
  I use Wayland with GNOME all day every day and it works fine. There are still minor issues versus legacy X, but it's certainly more than a "tech-demo".
  - dsego 7y ago
    Is it finally possible to share the screen on a video conference call?
    - jhoward321 7y ago
      Unless it's changed in the last month or so, no.
      - tpopela 7y ago
        Exactly nothing changed last month, because it works for quite some time. See https://jgrulich.cz/2018/07/02/screen-sharing-support-in-webrtc-for-wayland-sessions/ https://jgrulich.cz/2018/07/02/screen-sharing-support-in-web... and https://jgrulich.cz/2018/07/04/how-to-enable-and-use-screen-sharing-on-wayland/ https://jgrulich.cz/2018/07/04/how-to-enable-and-use-screen-... and https://twitter.com/tomaspopela/status/1105740090784006144 https://twitter.com/tomaspopela/status/1105740090784006144. Also we are currently working on some improvements to improve the UX - https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/c/chromium/src/+/1942327/ https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/c/chromium/src/+/19...
    - fourmyle 7y ago
      I use Sway but what I do is use Google Hangouts in Chromium (Xwayland) instead of Firefox (Wayland) when I want to screen share. I heard Zoom doesn't work yet though.
    - Polylactic_acid 7y ago
      If the software supports it, yes. Most commercial programs have not been updated to support it yet but the feature is there.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
  - snarfy 7y ago
    Does VNC or RDP work now? That's what is keeping me back.
    - any1 7y ago
      Yes, both Gnome and Sway have VNC: https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/Mutter/RemoteDesktop https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/Mutter/RemoteDesktop, https://github.com/any1/wayvnc https://github.com/any1/wayvnc. Weston has RDP, and there are efforts being made to also add VNC.
    - sterwill 7y ago
      I don't need VNC or RDP, so I don't know. I know that sharing other windows or my whole desktop in Google Hangouts doesn't work, but I rarely need that. I figure I'll log back in with an X session if I need that.
- bitwize 7y ago
  Anybody with any sort of graphical expertise on Linux with the exception of Keith Packard is working on Wayland, not X. Wayland is still the future.
- oehtXRwMkIs 7y ago
  Seems like an out of touch opinion, I'm using sway and very satisfied with it.
  - jsjddbbwj 7y ago
    If you use sway (an i3 clone), how can you say something is out of touch? If anything your use case is absolutely in the minority
    - jniedrauer 7y ago
      Sway is a pretty popular project, and gaining momentum. I also use sway for all of my machines (including workstation and personal laptop) and am quite happy with it.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
    Someone who uses their GUI as the worlds most over-engineered tmux session should be careful about calling others "out of touch".
- DCKing 7y ago
  This is a strange opinion to express in general, but really strange on this news. Linux hasn't had hardware video acceleration in a browser for over a decade when Windows and macOS did have it, precisely because it was too hard to support this use case within the restrictions of X11. The buffer sharing trickery, combined with having to render web pages and a browser around it, was just too hard to solve for years (within the limited attention X11 based desktops get in general). Linux finally has a graphics stack on which this isn't as much of a problem, and it's received enough adoption that Firefox is now making changes for it. And on that news you decide to comment that Wayland is a tech demo? This news should tell you it's completely the opposite! Wayland seems to be finally delivering.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
    Parent is kinda right. Wayland was supposed to be this great next-gen display protocol for Linux, finally doing away with the cruft of X and thereby making development faster and easier while bringing modern features and yadda yadda. Instead it has taken 10 years to kinda-sorta catch up to X and is still behind its equivalents on Win/Mac.
    - DCKing 7y ago
      Wayland has a lot of problems, but they're adoption problems. 1) Wayland isn't a replacement for all of X.org. It's a replacement for much of X11, the protocol. "Wayland is just a protocol" - there's no wayland binary on your computer like there is an xorg binary. All the problems/limitations people commonly perceive with Wayland are actually problems/limitations within Wayland implementations like Mutter (Gnome) or KWin (KDE) and lacking application support. There's really not that much that "Wayland" as a project could deliver as it's just a protocol [1]! 2) Replacing something like your entire graphics stack requires a widespread, coordinated effort to unify the various Linux distro's under it. That widespread coordinated effort is not actually possible in the (by "design") extremely fragmented Linux market. The only approach is to slowly let Wayland implementations evolve, and there we have it. Hot take: Wayland will not fully replace X11 the coming 10 years. There is no fundamental solution to the two problems above. Many popular desktops (Xfce, Cinnamon) have no plan to support Wayland at all. Some don't even want to. In the future, there will be choices for graphics stacks on Linux leading to further fragmentation. [1]: The projects that should deliver here are: Gnome, KDE, other open source desktops. Although I think using Gnome with Wayland is superior in many ways to X11, it still has certain quite major shortcomings. It's also application toolkits: Qt and Gtk work luckily, but Electron is waiting for some Chrome renovations before supporting Wayland, and then there's stuff like Wine and Java where the refactor/reward balance simply doesn't favor them. And sometimes applications have to be updated to stop relying on using hardcoded X11 stuff, and use agnostic Gtk/Qt/Freedesktop functionality. There's a lot of history with X11 that we have to move away from, and the incentives and coordination only allow for slow movement.
nirv 7y ago
Well, the simple answer is: not likely. In order to run Firefox under Wayland, you have to be able to run Wayland session in your compositor (Clutter in case of Gnome). AFAIK, currently no compositor has working/stable Wayland support with NVidia proprietary drivers due to GBM/EGLStreams thing[1]. At the same time, open-source Nvidia driver Nouveau is in a terribly poor condition. Which, hopefully, may change soon[2][3]. Thus, if system is running off the Nvidia graphics card with proprietary drivers, there's no way to use Gnome Wayland session and Firefox 75 acceleration at the moment [corrected and specified]. Please correct me, if I'm wrong. A separate case is where the system uses Intel/AMD graphics card and drivers, and NVidia is used for render offloading (Optimus/PRIME/Bumblebee). This may be a laptop with discrete GPU or Virtual Machine setup with GPU passthrough. Since I don't have such a setup, I can't check if it works with Firefox 75 [corrected]. But there're some discussions[4] on the matter and experimental works on implementing NVIDIA VDPAU-VAAPI wrapper[5]. [1] https://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2019/04/03/preparing-for-fedora-workstation-30/ https://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2019/04/03/preparing-for-fedo... [2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2019/12/06/nvidia-is-prepping-an-unexpected-surprise-for-linux-users-in-2020/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2019/12/06/nvidi... [3] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NVIDIA-Open-Source-GTC-20 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NVIDIA-O... [4] https://old.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/a94zzj/state_of_wayland_and_hybrid_graphics/ https://old.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/a94zzj/state_of_... [5] https://packages.debian.org/stretch/vdpau-va-driver https://packages.debian.org/stretch/vdpau-va-driver
- danieldk 7y ago
  Moral of the story: do not buy NVIDIA, except if you need it for e.g. CUDA. My previous machine had an NVIDIA GPU and despite all the great work, nouveau was almost unworkably buggy. The proprietary NVIDIA drivers did not work with Wayland at all. I bought an AMD card, Wayland worked with open source drivers and everything was butter-smooth. I now use a NUC with an Intel GPU. Similarly to ADM GPUs, it works great with open source drivers.
  - nirv 7y ago
    Yeah, sorta-kinda. If only AMD would be able to compete timely in the higher end GPU segment. It took AMD 2+ years to release Radeon RX 5700 XT (Jul 2019)† to match (with a very good stretch) Nvidia GTX 1080 TI (Mar 2017). I support AMD and Intel for their open-source efforts, but still hold hopes for GTC 2020 announces. † AMD Radeon VII was super overpriced and unavailable in my area, and it still released nearly two years later.
diafygi 7y ago
I believe that's tracked in Bug 1210729, which is included in the overall hardware video playback tracking Bug 1210726. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1210729 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1210729 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1210726 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1210726

diafygi 7y ago

Relevant comment for X11: > (In reply to lilydjwg from comment #30) >> I'm glad to here that, but what about support for Firefox on X11? Is it given up? > Hardware decoding is platform independent so it generally works under X11 as it's implemented as Bug 1616185. > For whole playback chain see Bug 1610199 what's needed to be done fox X11. > I was closing this one as it refers to HW decode only, not the playback. > The overall video playback is tracked at Bug 1210726. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1210727#c31 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1210727#c31

miguelmota 7y ago

As a regular linux user should I switch to wayland from xorg? will I notice performance improvements?

mcovey 7y ago
As a regular linux user, no, don't worry about whether you're using wayland or xorg, just use whatever comes with your distro. Let the maintainers worry about those things and just be a user.
danieldk 7y ago
Upsides: more secure (in X.org every client can read every other client's keystrokes, pointer position, and do screen grabs), generally smoother rendering, better support for mixed-DPI setups. Current downsides: worse support for screen recording/sharing (e.g. not supported in Skype), a bug in the compositor (e.g. GNOME Mutter) can bring your whole session down, not-as-good NVIDIA support (also depending on the compositor). I have been using Wayland for two years or so an wouldn't want to go back. I do miss wide screen sharing support, because I am working remotely and Skype is the primary means of communication.
- jchw 7y ago
  Isn’t modern Skype using WebRTC that would be supported at least in beta with xdg-desktop-portal?
- tsar9x 7y ago
  Did you try to use WebRTC PipeWire for screen sharing?
  - danieldk 7y ago
    Yes, it works with some applications, like Jitsi. No luck with Skype so far.
- TacticalCoder 7y ago
  Haven't switched yet. Under Wayland, can users which are not owning the session display an app on the Wayland session/server? (e.g. under X I can do something like "xhost +" and then have any user display an app on the X server). I'm not asking about the security implications of doing that under X (as you already mentioned, X is less secure and an app can read another app's screen content etc.): just if it's doable or not under Wayland?

ambrop7 7y ago

The mention of DMA-BUF makes me suspect that it involves rendered video being copied from the GPU to the main RAM and back to the GPU, which wastes energy. Does someone have details about how the integration works?

amluto 7y ago
The linked blog post makes it reasonably clear that this isn’t happening. https://mastransky.wordpress.com/2020/03/03/webgl-and-fgx-acceleration-on-wayland/ https://mastransky.wordpress.com/2020/03/03/webgl-and-fgx-ac...
cycloptic 7y ago
It's the opposite. The point of using DMA-BUFs is that those are the handles which are passed around, and the data never leaves GPU memory. The handles can be directly accessed from EGL/Vulkan and used as render source/targets.
- ambrop7 7y ago
  This is quite unclear to me. Is DMA-BUF so generic that the memory it refers to can be in different types of RAM, including GPU RAM and CPU RAM?
  - jdashg 7y ago
    Yes.
  - floatboth 7y ago
    That is the whole point, one of the original use cases was passing around buffers between different GPUs on dual-graphics laptops (PRIME)
    - ambrop7 7y ago
      Do you maybe know, when frames rendered by GPU 1 (e.g. fast GPU) need to be sent to GPU 2 (e.g. slow GPU doing the compositing and outputting to the monitor), how does the data actually get transferred? I can imagine the following possibilities: 1) GPU 1 writes to CPU RAM, GPU 2 reads from CPU RAM 2) GPU 1 writes to GPU 2 RAM via PCI Express (DMA between devices) 3) GPU 2 reads from GPU 1 RAM via PCI Express (DMA between devices)

shmerl 7y ago

What's missing so far is VAAPI support for WebRTC. Apparently, Firefox is using same libwebrtc as Chrome does, and it still doesn't support hardware acceleration. This results in some ugly behavior of WebEx for instance, which blocks video in its WebRTC calls, since it assumes that "CPU is too weak" to handle it. Cisco never fixed this issue.

dzonga 7y ago

for linux users, this is the best Firefox news in a loooong long time. having to copy paste links from youtube to smplayer for mpv hardware accelerated video can be a PITA.

EricRiese 7y ago

There's a $380 bounty for this [1]. If you fixed this, please collect this. You deserve it. I hope this doesn't get lost just because it got fixed in a different ticket number. [1] https://www.bountysource.com/issues/55506502-add-va-api-hardware-decoding-support-on-linux https://www.bountysource.com/issues/55506502-add-va-api-hard...

abrowne 7y ago
That's not a bad "tip", but keep in mind the person who worked on this (Martin Stránský) is employed by Red Hat to "work on mozilla packages (Firefox, Seamonkey, Thunderbird) in Fedora and Red Hat."¹ 1: https://people.redhat.com/stransky/ https://people.redhat.com/stransky/
- thayne 7y ago
  Assuming he worked on it on company time, wouldn't that mean Red Hat could collect it?

sitzkrieg 7y ago

does this mean playing video will not use half of cpu available (at best) constantly on linux now?