Firefox 71 Landing Wayland DMA-BUF Textures Support

[nanonyme]

I do remember that Intel (I think it is on 01.org) have done a bunch of work towards getting Ozone (their ui lib?) to support wayland. Not entirely sure where that work got to though

Edit: https://github.com/Igalia/chromium/t...ne-wayland-dev seems to be upstreamed and https://chromium.googlesource.com/ch...ne_overview.md shows there is experimental Wayland since m57

My understanding is it's largely because it's hitting quite a lot of the project components many of which clearly aren't equipped to deal with reviewing external contributions in promptly manner.

[nanonyme]

This is really great! I hope they eventually end up using EGL also in X11 codepath.

[treba]

The DMABUF work is a perquisite for hardware video decoding. Chrome also uses it for it's implementation.

[ernstp]

It's funny. Firefox, and Chrome, use the GPU more and more for the internet browsing, but on Linux they do not use the GPU for the video decoding, one of the most important thing in the internet world. Maybe their programmers are not good enough and do not know how to do it. Please, can someone help them? It's funny.

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.

[wizard69]

Maybe someday we'll get HW accelerated video decoding...

Maybe. However what this points out to me is the value in a good GPU. Off loading to the GPU should increase performance on most systems. This is also why I try to turn people to systems with a semi decent GPU even if they aren’t gamers.

[aufkrawall]

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

My 6700k is well overchallanged with 4k 60fps HEVC 10 bit high bitrate.

[uid313]

The Wayland support is shaping up nicely for Firefox. The last months there have been very much progress. Now you can run Firefox on Wayland it works pretty well, even though it doesn't work perfectly yet.

[-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)

[Guest]

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.