Firefox Developers Have Issues With Linux GPU Drivers Too

[bjacob]

Well, I hope I will be able to force hardware acceleration on my nvidia blob if not I will be not pleased xD

The NVIDIA proprietary driver is whitelisted, so you won't need to do anything: it runs WebGL out of the box.

You can even enable GL compositing which will greatly increase WebGL performance (but hurt performance in other contexts, sadly, due to missing GL-XRender interop code at the moment, something we hope to fix soon) by going to about:config and setting layers.acceleration.force-enabled.

[glxextxexlg]

NVIDIA proprietary driver is not buggy, for what we are doing (which is pure OpenGL). We are enabling hardware acceleration on X with the NVIDIA proprietary driver.

The FGLRX driver is crashier, it's blacklisted at the moment, this could change (everything hopefully will change :-) )

We are looking forward to un-blacklisting drivers as soon as they get good enough

AMD/ATI do you hear that? After all those years of development and with generous code flowing from windows devs, why do you people have a bag full of cockroaches that you service to your linux customers with the label of "driver"? Its time for you to wake up and really fix issues!

[bjacob]

The question is if a WHITE or BLACKLIST is used... that's the opposite.

C'mon, no need to argue over words, it's so intricate anyway. Among all GL platforms, GLX is blacklisted, but inside of it, the NVIDIA proprietary driver is whitelisted.

PS. I used to be a huge fan of Kanotix and am currently running aptosid which I believe is a descendant of Kanotix.

[Kano]

@bjacob

Kanotix is based on stable now - but of course i have got test images with squeeze, but only for those who ask. I have got nothing to do with the distro you use.

[bjacob]

@bjacob

Kanotix is based on stable now - but of course i have got test images with squeeze, but only for those who ask. I have got nothing to do with the distro you use.

Ah OK, sorry I thought that aptosid was an offspring of Kanotix (via sidux). Anyway, Kanotix has been invaluable to me as a live CD with LaTeX running out of the box.

[molecule-eye]

Hark!

This is one of the MANY reasons I'm staying away from Intel video chipsets in the future, even the integrated graphics of Sandy Bridge is pretty sweet from a performance-per-watt perspective.

[mat69]

Sounds good. Thanks for the info - I'm still learning all this.

In a nutshell, then, it seems as if the core issue here is that there are a bunch of relatively new GL ES driver implementations around and those code paths are being taken if available.

This has some similarities to the situation with new KWin versions -- in most cases the user experience with applications is improved if work-in-process extensions and features are exposed even in a "mostly working" state, but some applications (particularly those which are smart enough to dynamically select from multiple back-ends at runtime) end up running on an API which is exposed but still in development rather than a "less preferable" API whose implementation may be a lot more mature.

I don't think we have found a good answer for this other than more communication between app and driver developers. This particular issue will probably go away on its own as the GL ES implementations mature, but the core issue (conflict between the need to expose WIP functionality to support driver development and the need for exposed APIs and extensions to be rock solid ie not in development) remains unresolved. We really need some kind of extension/API mechanism with a bit more subtlety, ie a third "this is exposed but in development, so if you *can* work with a lower API level you should" state between "not exposed" and "exposed".

If there are runtime options to (for example) ignore GL ES even if it is exposed that would probably be a big help in the short term.

Thanks again for the info.

Damnit, this is not the same situation of "new versions of KWin". You completely get it wrong -- you aren't the first and won't be the last though.

The parts that lead to bad experiences in KWin have mostly not been changed since 4.0!
What has changed were drivers which reported "no I don't support this" in 2008 while now they do "I do support this" while the later is not the case in reality.
You can't ask KWin devs to try out the drivers of the future, no DeLorean there.

[Wyatt]

We're actually not interacting with X on a deep level at all here. What we're talking about here really is pure OpenGL. X is almost entirely abstracted behind the OpenGL API. All what we need is a good implementation of OpenGL itself. Contrast this with e.g. composited window managers, which do much more complex X stuff.

Just out of curiosity, are you associated with Mozilla? Just so I have some kind of context for what you're saying here. No offense, but I tend to be somewhat skeptical if it's just what random users are saying.

[hubick]

Just out of curiosity, are you associated with Mozilla?

http://tinyurl.com/4gu8pjq

[tessio]

OpenSource drivers are good enough to play Quake 3, but not to show photos moving in circles?