Google Still Doesn't Trust Linux GPU Drivers Enough To Enable Chrome Video Acceleration

[prazola]

Well, if i launch a game after watching a video with chrome/chromium on windows, my PC hangs I must shut it down. The problem is between chromium hw acceleration and AMD closed driver. I've never get a problem with video hw acceleration in linux.

[swizzler]

They could merge the patches and leave it disabled as default, I think most of us did that for their general renderer anyway

The problem is that media drivers are not written by open source teams. 3D drivers are fully open source, and have high quality. Closed source media drivers interact with the GPU, but in common cases cause the GPU to hang. This is unacceptable for Google, which wants a good user experience.

The cost to decode media on the CPU is higher, but at least it doesn't hang your whole machine. Google has no recourse, because the closed media driver teams have no idea of linux and can't repro or figure out how to approach the problem.

[swizzler]

Actually there are few bugs in the libva driver here and there but it works perfectly. Using chromium with vaapi acceleration for 6 months now.(Actually became a maintainer on fedora's rpmfusion and official package is coming in this week).

According to my testing on amdgpu and intel, Only dash videos with different video profiles breaks sometimes. Rest is stable with absolute no crashes. (Unless you're using Nvidia which is understandable.)
Intel vaapi driver breaks on wayland.

Google uses a very old kernel for ChromeOS, with many backports to support graphics. On that kernel, my understanding is media + 3d => gpuhang.

[pal666]

on linux google does not have to compete with ms or apple offering, so why bother

[pal666]

Linux on the desktop is essentially broken

you'll find your dream job on russian tv if you like repeating same bullshit again and again.
linux is the only desktop os with growing marketshare

[pal666]

2. My current Windows system has sound issues, so GNU/Linux doesn't compare badly here.

you are lucky that you are not creative sb x-fi user switched to vista. they were left without sound for several years

[pal666]

Installing/updating software on desktop linux (apt, dnf etc) was horrible until Flatpak/Snap came along or you used AppImage.

installing/updating software is broken on windows. on linux it just works

I can't install X program because it requires a version of Y that installing said version will break Z which turns out to be important for the system.

use non-broken distro

[pal666]

Millions of Windows users all over the world build their own DIY PC from off-the-shelf component and successfully get a perfectly working system installed within two hours maximum. With perfect up-to-date drivers that enable full power management and unlocks the full capabilities of the hardware they paid money for.

Unlike Linux.

of course unlike linux. on linux same task takes 10 minutes, not 2 hours

Windows users do that everyday and the OS doesn't shit on them for doing so. Install a package from elsewhere in Linux and there's a risk that the distribution won't even boot anymore after a reboot.

in real world outside of your fantasies windows user can get non-booting pc by installing os updates

Software applications like web browsers can auto-update on the fly in Windows

they have to because windows will not update them. on linux all software has autoupdate

[pal666]

This was ~10 months ago, application needed newer version of libvala (I think?) than what was in the 16.04 repo. Downloaded a newer deb of libvala, installing application worked. Now a bunch of other applications no longer work as they didn't like that version of libvala. Yes maybe it didn't happen to you, but it does still happen and it shouldn't.

Windows has issues but this doesn't happen on Windows

lol. google "dll hell"

[pal666]

More like a frustrating fact for linux useres who happened to buy their hardware based on merit and pricing.

linux users buying on merit wouldn't buy hardware from most linux-hostile vendor

It's easier to find good deals on high performing nvidia cards than amd

but most users don't buy high performing cards

They're pieces of shit, btu they have the better hardwawre for better price points budget wise...

only in their advertisements. presumably they have better marketing budget than amd