Firefox 80 and my confusion over its hardware accelerated video on Linux

Re:Firefox 80 and my confusion over its hardware accelerated... by ronjouch on Friday August 28, 2020 @03:45PM (#24309137)

Yes, the UX is raw for now; hopefully Mozilla will make it simpler to enable after a few versions of testing and confirming it doesn't cause crashes for half the linux userbase. It makes sense to do little early advertising of such a feature, and to initially hide it behind flags & env. vars only within reach of "power users", because these fresh-out-of-the-oven bits are a complex assembly with heavy crash potential, depending on your hardware and drivers up-to-date-ness. As the implementer, you want your initial users to know what they are doing, and you want to maximize the chances they're technically proficient enough to gather the mountain of gpu/driver/environment debug info you'll need for a bug report to be actionable.

In the meantime, to save you rummaging around bugzilla, follow https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Firefox#Hardware_video_... , it's the most constantly {up-to-date, concise, reliable} source you'll find. You don't have to be using Arch, the information contained in this section applies to any Linux/Firefox distro.

Note that Firefox isn't the only browser to struggle with it; see https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Chromium#Hardware_video... for the similarly non-obvious instructions in Chromium (and by the way, currently it's plain impossible in Chrome).

Props to Martin Stransky from RedHat who implemented this for both Wayland and Xorg during the last months.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Firefox 80 and my confusion over its hardware accelerated... by test7777 on Friday August 28, 2020 @08:36PM (#24312127)

do what chrome does, detect crash and fallback. what are sandboxes even for if you can't crash once in a while without whining too much about it...

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Firefox 80 and my confusion over its hardware accelerated... by ronjouch on Friday August 28, 2020 @11:15PM (#24313078)

I doubt things are that simple.

See my before-last paragraph above: no, regarding hardware video acceleration, even Chrome doesn't do what you describe. What you describe stands for non-video content crashes, which isn't what's being discussed here. Could the technique you mention be applied to video gpu crashes? I personally don't know and I'd lean towards "nope" (else Mozilla & Google engineers wouldn't be so exceedingly cautious about it). If anyone is knowledgeable enough to precise / contradict this, please chime in.

At any rate, even Chrome is built with zero hardware video acceleration support on Linux (hardware acceleration yes, hardware video acceleration no). Chromium does offer the option, just as hidden behind flags as Firefox, and until last month you had to build it yourself with a VAAPI patch left unmerged for years by Chromium devs.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Firefox 80 and my confusion over its hardware accelerated... by stingraycharles on Saturday August 29, 2020 @04:11AM (#24314551)

That sounds nice in theory, but only works if you can (reliably) detect the cause of a crash. This is one of those things that sound much easier than it actually is.

[ Parent | on HN ]