Video Acceleration Takes The Backseat On Chrome For Linux

[getaceres]

Oh yes, let's blame Google for being tired the mess which is the graphical stack of Linux nowadays. We have a graphic stack which was designed more than 30 years ago and to make it work with modern paradigms we patch it in every conceivable way. So taking apart DRI vs DRI2, XInput vs XInput2, Mesa vs Gallium3D, KMS and any other new patch above X limitations:

It comes Intel with EXA, UXA, GEM, SNA and God knows what else
Nvidia replacing half of the mess with their own private, closed and cryptic implementation
AMD doing the same on their part

Everyone has their own implementation of video acceleration and every one supports other features or not depending on their will and I'm ruling out legacy sytems and graphic stacks out of the main three. So now Adobe, Google or whatever other company tries to get hardware acceleration for their product of implement some other fancy feature easily implemented on the unified stack of Windows or OSX and they find bug after bug and it's normal.

And the situation is not improving. Wayland is taking ages to come out and still we have to see the support it might get from Nvidia and AMD, because without it, it's useless and in the mix comes Mir. Really?

So either Steam or Canonical or anyone else comes into play and gets enough traction to get companies on their side and cleans this mess in a dictatorship way or we continue as we go right now. Contrary to propietary systems we have freedom to implement what we want, but the price to pay is not having features implemented by third parties in a timely manner or implemented at all.

[johnc]

Oh yes, let's blame Google for being tired the mess which is the graphical stack of Linux nowadays. We have a graphic stack which was designed more than 30 years ago and to make it work with modern paradigms we patch it in every conceivable way. So taking apart DRI vs DRI2, XInput vs XInput2, Mesa vs Gallium3D, KMS and any other new patch above X limitations:

It comes Intel with EXA, UXA, GEM, SNA and God knows what else
Nvidia replacing half of the mess with their own private, closed and cryptic implementation
AMD doing the same on their part

Everyone has their own implementation of video acceleration and every one supports other features or not depending on their will and I'm ruling out legacy sytems and graphic stacks out of the main three. So now Adobe, Google or whatever other company tries to get hardware acceleration for their product of implement some other fancy feature easily implemented on the unified stack of Windows or OSX and they find bug after bug and it's normal.

And the situation is not improving. Wayland is taking ages to come out and still we have to see the support it might get from Nvidia and AMD, because without it, it's useless and in the mix comes Mir. Really?

So either Steam or Canonical or anyone else comes into play and gets enough traction to get companies on their side and cleans this mess in a dictatorship way or we continue as we go right now. Contrary to propietary systems we have freedom to implement what we want, but the price to pay is not having features implemented by third parties in a timely manner or implemented at all.

Despite that screed of yours, one of the things I have noticed is that video playback on Linux is infinitely better than on Windows.

Anybody who has problems on Linux must have some turd hardware or software.

And Google has never been good at writing software. It's all third-rate, minimum-wage broken crap that looks like it was designed by a chimp on meth.

[jaxxed]

Google? Really?

I had a LOL-of-irony at that as well.

[gradinaruvasile]

Mozilla managed to do this with whitelisits. Not sure why Chrome team can not.

Yeah. My thoughts exactly. I have the latest OSS stack from git (A8-6500 apu, radeon/r600g driver) and Seamonkey and Firefox run webgl demos just fine and has accelerated playback (decoding too if enabled in the mms.cfg, but that seems to be limited to youtube, flash content on other sites crashes typically).

Chrome untiil quite recently worked just fine (albeit with generally higher CPU usage than Firefox/Seamonkey) if i disabled its blacklist, but recent versions crapped out, even SD flash video playback is crap and manages to use 200-300% CPU (i have 4 cores). This makes Chrome on Linux with OSS drivers (at least radeon) crap.
Summing it up, Chrome devs are just lazy - if Firefox could do it, what stops the best funded browser in the world (ok, ONE of them) from implementing it?

BTW Steam Source games run just perfectly fine on the radeon/OSS drivers.

[pandev92]

Yeah. My thoughts exactly. I have the latest OSS stack from git (A8-6500 apu, radeon/r600g driver) and Seamonkey and Firefox run webgl demos just fine and has accelerated playback (decoding too if enabled in the mms.cfg, but that seems to be limited to youtube, flash content on other sites crashes typically).

Chrome untiil quite recently worked just fine (albeit with generally higher CPU usage than Firefox/Seamonkey) if i disabled its blacklist, but recent versions crapped out, even SD flash video playback is crap and manages to use 200-300% CPU (i have 4 cores). This makes Chrome on Linux with OSS drivers (at least radeon) crap.
Summing it up, Chrome devs are just lazy - if Firefox could do it, what stops the best funded browser in the world (ok, ONE of them) from implementing it?

BTW Steam Source games run just perfectly fine on the radeon/OSS drivers.

I have an apu a8 5600k and I experienced the same issues with google chrome/chromium.

[dee.]

Oh yes, let's blame Google

Yes. Lets.

[d2kx]

I use the opensource radeon stack on my HD 6870 and am a heavy Google Chrome user with the GPU blacklist disabled (to enable hardware acceleration where possible). Everything runs fine. Obviously video decoding is not accelerated, I am only talking about the general usage.

[andyprough]

Anyway does chromeOS has acceleration of some kind ? I would think they would enable it at least for their own platform

As of December, some Samsung Chromebooks had the following flags you could enable or switch to default behavior to try out experimental Chrome OS video acceleration.

Enable the following:
chrome://flags/#ignore-gpu-blacklist
chrome://flags/#enable-experimental-canvas-features
chrome://flags/#accelerated-filters
chrome://flags/#enable-nacl

Set the following as default:
chrome://flags/#force-accelerated-composited-scrolling
chrome://flags/#force-universal-accelerated-composited-scrolling

Also, you could enable swap if it wasn't already to give it a bit of a boost:
(Ctrl+Alt+T) and type "swap enable" and reboot

There's some Chromebook Google groups posts describing these flags in greater detail. It was all experimental in December, but seems stable enough, and gives a better experience. There may be some additional video acceleration flags in the past couple of months - I haven't checked recently.

[robclark]

Oh yes, let's blame Google for being tired the mess which is the graphical stack of Linux nowadays. We have a graphic stack which was designed more than 30 years ago and to make it work with modern paradigms we patch it in every conceivable way. So taking apart DRI vs DRI2, XInput vs XInput2, Mesa vs Gallium3D, KMS and any other new patch above X limitations:

Well, it's not entirely unprecedented for an operating system to evolve new API's, technologies, infrastructures, etc, as hardware evolves. Windows has done it. Macosx has done it. Unless you have a crystal ball, you aren't really going to know enough about 5 or 10 years from now (let alone 30 years) what hardware will look like and what crazy peripherals will exist in order to design something that lasts for ever. Some people call it progress. Others complain on forums ;-)

It comes Intel with EXA, UXA, GEM, SNA and God knows what else

GEM is an infrastructure for sharing buffers. Intel/radeon/nouveau drivers all use it.

EXA/UXA/SNA on the other hand are acceleration APIs within the xserver. And in fact UXA and SNA are just private inside intel's ddx driver.

I expect windows or macosx have their fair share of three-letter-acronyms. If you all put them in one big pile, it will look like a mess too. :-)

Nvidia replacing half of the mess with their own private, closed and cryptic implementation
AMD doing the same on their part

Everyone has their own implementation of video acceleration and every one supports other features or not depending on their will and I'm ruling out legacy sytems and graphic stacks out of the main three. So now Adobe, Google or whatever other company tries to get hardware acceleration for their product of implement some other fancy feature easily implemented on the unified stack of Windows or OSX and they find bug after bug and it's normal.

And the situation is not improving. Wayland is taking ages to come out and still we have to see the support it might get from Nvidia and AMD, because without it, it's useless and in the mix comes Mir. Really?

I suppose the difference compared to proprietary operating systems is that you see the entire development phase from conception to adoption vs abandonment. Well, this is just speculation, since I don't know internals of microsoft/apple, but I would assume they don't announce some new project until it is reasonably far in the development process.

Anyways, the "problem" with wayland is really just that x11 has been approximately good enough to live with.. and so more focus was placed on getting things right, consideration of lots of different use cases (there *is* more than just desktop these days), etc, rather than getting it out the door yesterday. In the long run, it's a good thing. You have to live with API's for a much longer time than you spend designing them.

So either Steam or Canonical or anyone else comes into play and gets enough traction to get companies on their side and cleans this mess in a dictatorship way or we continue as we go right now. Contrary to propietary systems we have freedom to implement what we want, but the price to pay is not having features implemented by third parties in a timely manner or implemented at all.

I don't think it is quite as bad as it sounds. For the open src drivers, there are only two: intel with vaapi and radeon+nouveau with gallium (with user visible API, ie. xvmc/vdpau/omx being provided as gallium state trackers). You are not allowed to count nvidia/amd/other's closed source implementations if making comparisions between proprietary vs free.

[cynical]

I think the main issue is not video acceleration by itself, since that can be handed off to gstreamer like Firefox does on linux systems. The problem is more that Chrome is also using gpu acceleration for their UI and they can't guarantee it will work bug-free (imho) primarily due to FGLRX. I can't wait for the radeon driver to kill it so we can finally get decent third party support on Linux. If Nouveau could catch up and Intel would drop vaapi we would be in paradise ><