6 ms·

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 wh

by 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.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - sprash 7y ago
    > Wayland has a lot of problems, but they're adoption problems. No they are deep philosophical problems. The lack of necessary protocols that allow a unified implementation for things like screen sharing, hotkey daemons, window managers, xdotools or clipboard managers are the problem. As long as there is no standardized way to do essential tasks that are typical for a desktop use case Wayland will eternally cause problems.
    - DCKing 7y ago
      You're not describing a philosophical problem of "what's possible", as all of these things are perfectly possible on a desktop with Wayland and broader Freedesktop standards, and many have working examples currently. Wayland being as small as it is, is not supposed to be a restriction on features of your entire desktop. But there's no standard interopability with a standard X11 socket anymore. There's interopability with KWin and Mutter and wlroots and a bunch of other things through FreeDesktop standards (Wayland being among them). You might consider it a philosophical problem that Wayland is not trying to solve all the problems that X11 tried to solve. You might attach a lot of philosophical value to that architecture. But Windows, macOS, ChromeOS and Android seem to be doing extremely well on an architecture that is a lot less like X11 and a lot more like Wayland.
    - zlynx 7y ago
      > things like: > screen sharing: - Security problem, untrusted access to display, explicitly denied by design. > hotkey daemons - Security problem, untrusted input, denied by design. > window managers - Messing about with windows without authorization, denied by design. > xdotools - Untrusted input. > clipboard managers - Untrusted access to clipboard. Either the compositor application has to do it, or it has to delegate it to a trusted application. So yeah, deep philosophical problems. If you wanted Wayland to work exactly like X11 it won't because that is explicitly against its security design.
- danieldk 7y ago
  Wayland has been the default on Fedora since Fedora 25, released in 2016. I think replacing X.org in 8 years is pretty impressive, given that many desktop environments and too some extend toolkits have been tightly coupled to X11 in the past.
loudmax 7y ago
Did Compiz on X11 not have hardware acceleration? The wobbly windows and other effects on my old Atom powered Acer Aspire One were buttery smooth. If that dinky processor was pulling that off without help from the GPU, that's really impressive.
- DCKing 7y ago
  You're talking about something else. Hardware acceleration of 3D graphics is something completely different from utilizing the specific video decoding hardware in your GPU to decode web videos without hitting your CPU. Firefox has had generic GPU hardware acceleration on Linux for a while (albeit more buggy than on Windows/Mac), but this is about hardware video decoding.
  - nitrogen 7y ago
    How do applications like Kodi manage to overlay accelerated UI on accelerated video but Firefox can't?
    - DCKing 7y ago
      The way I understand it: Dedicated video players can build around hardware acceleration. They display a video and UI they control. Web browsers have to show other people's UIs, which can be dynamically resized, overlaid and otherwise modified. This makes it really hard to implement in current browser architectures without resorting to a solution that causes you to e.g. have to copy video frames from GPU memory to main memory, causing performance drops and stutter. With Wayland, it's "easier" to actually access the GPU's video frames directly (like on Windows and macOS), enabling this implementation.
    - imtringued 7y ago
      Firefox does more than a simple overlay.
sprash 7y ago
Compiz/beryl exists since 2006 which is 14 years ago. And this was really impressive working software, not just a demo. So impressve in fact, that it made many people switch to Linux. Windows Vista with a truly 3D accelerated desktop came after that. Also this "news" does not tell that Wayland is finally delivering. It tells us that the Wayland implementation of Firefox has reached feature party to X11 for very specific subsystems.
- DCKing 7y ago
  You're completely misunderstanding what this is about. Hardware video acceleration is not about rendering 3D graphics. This is about being able to play web videos without causing you to lose CPU performance and battery life. This has not really been supported on Linux or X11, whereas it has been supported on Windows and Mac by almost all browsers for over a decade. The fact that this will be officially supported by a major browser vendor on Wayland first should tell you something.
  - sprash 7y ago
    > Hardware video acceleration All video players on X11 have VDPAU support since ages. This is a Firefox specific problem which could be solved more easy on X11. > The fact that this will be officially supported by a major browser vendor on Wayland first should tell you something. It just tells me that Mozilla/Firefox really doesn't care about Linux because it took them 14 years since VDPAU works reliably on Linux to implement it.
    - DCKing 7y ago
      Gnome Web, Midori, Falkon and Konqueror are browsers that only run on the "free" desktop, and don't support VAAPI/VDPAU either. Google built an entire OS based on Gentoo, and the desktop Linux build of Chrome doesn't support video acceleration either. I think you should reconsider how easy it is to smoothly get an accelerated video buffer from a specific GPU component into an already heavily GPU optimized and dynamic web page. Web browsers have a lot more complicated graphics rendering problems to solve than VLC does.
jcelerier 7y ago
> Linux hasn't had hardware video acceleration 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. mpv and kodi have no trouble rendering hardware accelerated video on Linux under X11 though
- MrRadar 7y ago
  They are a much simpler use-case. They just need to present video. Web browsers need to composite the video within arbitrary documents which may e.g. have elements that overlap the video (opaque or transparent) or may arbitrarily transform the video (CSS applies to videos just like any other element).
  - jcelerier 7y ago
    > Web browsers need to composite the video within arbitrary documents which may e.g. have elements that overlap the video (opaque or transparent) or may arbitrarily transform the video (CSS applies to videos just like any other element). both Kodi and MPV have UI overlays that are composited on top of the video. Also, hardware decoding APIs (vdpau, vaapi...) are mostly unrelated to rendering - see for instance https://github.com/NVIDIA/vdpau-hevc-example/blob/master/main.c https://github.com/NVIDIA/vdpau-hevc-example/blob/master/mai...

by DCKing 7y ago

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.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- sprash 7y ago
  > Wayland has a lot of problems, but they're adoption problems. No they are deep philosophical problems. The lack of necessary protocols that allow a unified implementation for things like screen sharing, hotkey daemons, window managers, xdotools or clipboard managers are the problem. As long as there is no standardized way to do essential tasks that are typical for a desktop use case Wayland will eternally cause problems.
  - DCKing 7y ago
    You're not describing a philosophical problem of "what's possible", as all of these things are perfectly possible on a desktop with Wayland and broader Freedesktop standards, and many have working examples currently. Wayland being as small as it is, is not supposed to be a restriction on features of your entire desktop. But there's no standard interopability with a standard X11 socket anymore. There's interopability with KWin and Mutter and wlroots and a bunch of other things through FreeDesktop standards (Wayland being among them). You might consider it a philosophical problem that Wayland is not trying to solve all the problems that X11 tried to solve. You might attach a lot of philosophical value to that architecture. But Windows, macOS, ChromeOS and Android seem to be doing extremely well on an architecture that is a lot less like X11 and a lot more like Wayland.
  - zlynx 7y ago
    > things like: > screen sharing: - Security problem, untrusted access to display, explicitly denied by design. > hotkey daemons - Security problem, untrusted input, denied by design. > window managers - Messing about with windows without authorization, denied by design. > xdotools - Untrusted input. > clipboard managers - Untrusted access to clipboard. Either the compositor application has to do it, or it has to delegate it to a trusted application. So yeah, deep philosophical problems. If you wanted Wayland to work exactly like X11 it won't because that is explicitly against its security design.
danieldk 7y ago
Wayland has been the default on Fedora since Fedora 25, released in 2016. I think replacing X.org in 8 years is pretty impressive, given that many desktop environments and too some extend toolkits have been tightly coupled to X11 in the past.

loudmax 7y ago

Did Compiz on X11 not have hardware acceleration? The wobbly windows and other effects on my old Atom powered Acer Aspire One were buttery smooth. If that dinky processor was pulling that off without help from the GPU, that's really impressive.

DCKing 7y ago
You're talking about something else. Hardware acceleration of 3D graphics is something completely different from utilizing the specific video decoding hardware in your GPU to decode web videos without hitting your CPU. Firefox has had generic GPU hardware acceleration on Linux for a while (albeit more buggy than on Windows/Mac), but this is about hardware video decoding.
- nitrogen 7y ago
  How do applications like Kodi manage to overlay accelerated UI on accelerated video but Firefox can't?
  - DCKing 7y ago
    The way I understand it: Dedicated video players can build around hardware acceleration. They display a video and UI they control. Web browsers have to show other people's UIs, which can be dynamically resized, overlaid and otherwise modified. This makes it really hard to implement in current browser architectures without resorting to a solution that causes you to e.g. have to copy video frames from GPU memory to main memory, causing performance drops and stutter. With Wayland, it's "easier" to actually access the GPU's video frames directly (like on Windows and macOS), enabling this implementation.
  - imtringued 7y ago
    Firefox does more than a simple overlay.

sprash 7y ago

Compiz/beryl exists since 2006 which is 14 years ago. And this was really impressive working software, not just a demo. So impressve in fact, that it made many people switch to Linux. Windows Vista with a truly 3D accelerated desktop came after that. Also this "news" does not tell that Wayland is finally delivering. It tells us that the Wayland implementation of Firefox has reached feature party to X11 for very specific subsystems.

DCKing 7y ago
You're completely misunderstanding what this is about. Hardware video acceleration is not about rendering 3D graphics. This is about being able to play web videos without causing you to lose CPU performance and battery life. This has not really been supported on Linux or X11, whereas it has been supported on Windows and Mac by almost all browsers for over a decade. The fact that this will be officially supported by a major browser vendor on Wayland first should tell you something.
- sprash 7y ago
  > Hardware video acceleration All video players on X11 have VDPAU support since ages. This is a Firefox specific problem which could be solved more easy on X11. > The fact that this will be officially supported by a major browser vendor on Wayland first should tell you something. It just tells me that Mozilla/Firefox really doesn't care about Linux because it took them 14 years since VDPAU works reliably on Linux to implement it.
  - DCKing 7y ago
    Gnome Web, Midori, Falkon and Konqueror are browsers that only run on the "free" desktop, and don't support VAAPI/VDPAU either. Google built an entire OS based on Gentoo, and the desktop Linux build of Chrome doesn't support video acceleration either. I think you should reconsider how easy it is to smoothly get an accelerated video buffer from a specific GPU component into an already heavily GPU optimized and dynamic web page. Web browsers have a lot more complicated graphics rendering problems to solve than VLC does.

jcelerier 7y ago

> Linux hasn't had hardware video acceleration 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. mpv and kodi have no trouble rendering hardware accelerated video on Linux under X11 though

MrRadar 7y ago
They are a much simpler use-case. They just need to present video. Web browsers need to composite the video within arbitrary documents which may e.g. have elements that overlap the video (opaque or transparent) or may arbitrarily transform the video (CSS applies to videos just like any other element).
- jcelerier 7y ago
  > Web browsers need to composite the video within arbitrary documents which may e.g. have elements that overlap the video (opaque or transparent) or may arbitrarily transform the video (CSS applies to videos just like any other element). both Kodi and MPV have UI overlays that are composited on top of the video. Also, hardware decoding APIs (vdpau, vaapi...) are mostly unrelated to rendering - see for instance https://github.com/NVIDIA/vdpau-hevc-example/blob/master/main.c https://github.com/NVIDIA/vdpau-hevc-example/blob/master/mai...