Chrome 96 To Feature Improved WebRTC Code, Better Wayland Screensharing

Next month's release of Chrome 96 is a bit more exciting now thanks to the work of Jan Grulich at Red Hat.

Jan Grulich has been working on a new DMA-BUF implementation within the WebRTC code as the original DMA-BUF buffer sharing code was found to be inadequate. In particular, the original DMA-BUF mmap-based approach was found to perform very slow with the AMD Radeon Linux graphics driver and instead this new implementation allows using an OpenGL context to get the context from the buffer. Long story short, after a lot of work that new WebRTC DMA-BUF code is now good to go.

Grulich additionally has made some improvements for faster Wayland screensharing by avoiding an extra buffer copy operation per-frame that in turn should help lower CPU usage. Moving ahead Grulich still has some further performance optimizations planned.

More details on these WebRTC improvements that are pulled in for next month's Google Chrome 96 browser release can be found via Grulich's blog. Hopefully Mozilla Firefox will get on this latest WebRTC code soon.