Firefox 71 Landing Wayland DMA-BUF Textures Support

[-MacNuke-]

Nowadays 3 CPU cores with AVX2 are able to decode any video type up to 4K 10-bit HDR 60Hz, the CPU might only have issues handling 8K videos

With fans spinning like crazy in notebooks....

[cybertraveler]

Will this mean Firefox can work in a zero-copy mode? IE it only works directly with the GPU memory buffer and that exact same buffer (at the exact same GPU memory address) is referenced by the Wayland compositor when compositing a fullscreen image to be displayed on the monitor?

... so instead of:
Firefox edits system RAM buffer -> Firefox copies RAM buffer to GPU buffer -> Desktop compositor copies GPU buffer to its own memory region -> Desktop compositor creates fullscreen image to display

... you get:
Firefox edits DMABUF, GPU buffer -> Desktop compositor creates fullscreen image to display based on that buffer (and others)

[frank007]

No, you know what is funny, that you complain about something you clearly do not understand. The wayland dmabuf support is a requirement for video decoding to avoid having to avoid unnecessary copying of data to and from the GPU. So you are complaining about them actually getting closer to the thing you want.

Ok, wayland is the newer linux game. You really do not understand what people write.

[frank007]

With the move to less patent-encumbered codecs like VP9 and AV1 it's less common that you actually have fixed function hardware that supports decoding your codec.

Really? The patent is about the hardware acceleration, not on the library used for decoding? mg

[ernstp]

Really? The patent is about the hardware acceleration, not on the library used for decoding? mg

The patent isn't about the hardware acceleration but it just happens that people have built a lot of h264 hardware and hardware is slow to catch up to new exciting opensource codec software.

[UlisesH]

my only current gripe with FF on Wayland is that when it starts the screen becomes corrupted. The solution is to switch virtual desktops back and forth and then works fine.

[Britoid]

my only current gripe with FF on Wayland is that when it starts the screen becomes corrupted. The solution is to switch virtual desktops back and forth and then works fine.

I haven't found that to happen on GNOME Wayland.

[starshipeleven]

Some notes:

• Nowadays 3 CPU cores with AVX2 are able to decode any video type up to 4K 10-bit HDR 60Hz, the CPU might only have issues handling 8K videos
  • GPU-assisted decoding is preferable when it results in smaller system power consumption compared to CPU-only video decoding or when the CPU is busy handling other tasks in addition to video decoding
  • Decoded 4K 10-bit HDR 60Hz requires about 1-2 GiB/s of memory bandwidth. Main memory bandwidth and PCI Express bandwidth are greater than 2 GiB/s.
• From historical perspective, HW acceleration of video decoding in x86 CPUs started with the Pentium MMX (released in January 1997)

Power consumption of CPU decoding is still orders of magnitude higher than using a dedicated hardware decoder, which is significant for most modern computing usage (laptop and mobile devices), while still mostly irrelevant for a desktop system.

[[email protected]]

You can downplay video hardware acceleration until you try to watch a video on a low powered device. Suddenly you feel like a caveman running it at 720p or even 480p, because the 720p is at 60fps.

[cl333r]

GPU-assisted decoding is preferable when it results in smaller system power consumption compared to CPU-only video decoding or when the CPU is busy handling other tasks in addition to video decoding

What? You say it like it's common otherwise.
AFAIK no CPU even with AVX2 is nearly equal power consumption wise to specialized video decoding in the GPU (if both are from the same year and vendor).