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Chromium blacklists Nouveau

lists.freedesktop.org

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Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#201

Post by bubblethink »

zanny wrote: post #104
bubblethink wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> most widespread linux distribution for one of the two most widespread GPU producers in the market That's still less than a percent of the market I think. Maybe shave off another order of magnitude. So the economic argument is not the one to make. However, it sucks nonetheless.

Its still probably hundreds of thousands of users. I hate arguments about "but Linux is only a fraction of the market!" because the total OS / browser usage market is in the billions of people. Even small fractions of that pie could found their own countries and be of reasonable size for a nation.

>found their own countries and be of reasonable size for a nation.

Honestly, you could fill up the number of people using nouveau with chromium in a stadium more likely. From the small pie of linux users, you drill down to nvidia, and then further down to nouveau. All laptop users, even with nvidia cards, will only use the intel gpu unless they explicitly enable the discrete mode and not install the nvidia drivers. Desktop users obviously only buy nvidia if they want to use the binary driver. What do you think remains of the pie ? I haven't met a single person in real life who uses this stack. I love nouveau. That doesn't change the numbers though.

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#202

Post by Operyl »

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #196
[deleted] wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

The new library which replaces wlc, wlroots, does not have that special code necessary to support the stupid Nvidia special-snowflake API. In simple terms, sway+wlroots DOES NOT have this line of code: if (nvidia proprietary driver) { suck(); } Rather, it looks like this: do_important_gpu_stuff(); // Nvidia does not implement this The Nvidia proprietary driver doesn't support the APIs necessary to run Sway. This is t…

Apologies. My original reply (now the deleted comment in thread) was on a misread comment (or edited not sure). Thanks for the expanded context, I still disagree with this grinding though.

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#203

Post by emmelaich »

dleslie wrote: post #159
nolok wrote: post #9

For anyone interested, the link really should be the full bug report: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=876523 The current link says it as if Chrome was not being fair, but reading their reasoning it makes total sense. Key quote from said bug report: > We thought about blacklisting nouveau driver long time ago, and decided to let more adventurous users to play around. Now that Ubuntu ships with no…

> Unfortunately we don't have the resources to test every variation of every GPU/driver combination on linux, let alone investigate & fix bugs in drivers. This is a lie. Google could easily undertake such an act, but is choosing not to. It's not that they _lack the resources to do so_, but that the value proposition of doing so did not weigh favourably towards undertaking the action. Google isn't incapable of this ta…

It's not just gpu/driver, it's library versions, compile flags, compiler versions plus all the flags (static and dynamic).

Let's say 50 options. If it costs $1 to test each combo it would cost 2^50, around $10^15 dollars. Google only made $10^9 dollars profit last year.

Now of course I'm being facetious but do not underestimate the cost of testing.

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#205

Post by superkuh »

Browsers should not need to have GPU acceleration anyway if they are just browsers. But instead, as is Chrome's/ium's style, it wants to be an OS instead of a browser. All other browsers are trying to follow suite but that still doesn't make it right. The more hardware functionality exposed the less secure a browser is.

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#206

Post by cwyers »

ddevault wrote: post #137
SquareWheel wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, what a conceited message. If you want to support nouveau, then you can put the work in. You have no right to demand that others do work for you. Especially when they already have a functioning alternative solution in software rendering.

I am not demanding that they do work. I'm demanding that they do not deliberately sabotoge the nouveau driver. If they find the nouveau driver lacking, they should improve it, not sabatoge it. If they don't want to put the work in, then they should just leave well enough alone.

But it's not well enough, people are filing bug reports with Chromium that are really bugs in noveau.

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#207

Post by loeg »

geofft wrote: post #193
loeg wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WebGL requires far more than just blitting onto a single boring texture.

That's why you go through llvmpipe - you use the Mesa OpeGL implementation in LLVM-JIT-accelerated but pure software mode to implement WebGL, get the results onto a texture, and pass that texture onto your actual graphics card. https://www.mesa3d.org/llvmpipe.html

That seems like something you'd prefer not to do if your OpenGL driver wasn't broken.

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#208

Post by loeg »

xyzzyz wrote: post #183
loeg wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's fairly uncommon for open source software to blacklist components that (attempt to) implement a compatible interface. Usually selecting an appropriate hardware driver is left in the hands of the distribution or administrator.

Yes, and the distributor or administrator is free to rebuild the browser or just set the flag to disable blacklisting. It’s only default behavior that changed.

Chrome has the special sauce — distributors and administrators cannot rebuild it, only Chromium.

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#209

Post by joshuamorton »

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #196
[deleted] wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

The new library which replaces wlc, wlroots, does not have that special code necessary to support the stupid Nvidia special-snowflake API. In simple terms, sway+wlroots DOES NOT have this line of code: if (nvidia proprietary driver) { suck(); } Rather, it looks like this: do_important_gpu_stuff(); // Nvidia does not implement this The Nvidia proprietary driver doesn't support the APIs necessary to run Sway. This is t…

>Nouveau implements the necessary APIs

This is not correct. They may have methods that match the required signatures, but the APIs do not do what they are supposed to do. "Crashing my computer" is not a documented feature of any webgl API I'm aware of.

From an API perspective, Nouveau lies (perhaps not intentionally, but in reality) to its consumers. Nouveau isn't holding up any part of the bargain. Having correct method signatures doesn't mean you implement an API if you return wrong results.

Crashing is a wrong result.

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#210

Post by cwyers »

belorn wrote: post #146
larkeith wrote: post #96

> One idea is to flip GL_VENDOR to some random string if chromium is running. What? Don't do this - never do this. Regardless of whether or not you agree with Chromium's decision, it is their decision to make as the project maintainers; trying to trick the software with falsified data is overstepping your bounds, and both corrodes trust in your driver and leads to whitelists. I thought we had moved past the days of f…

What we have is two side accusing the other of overstepping their bounds. Chromium making decision about drivers which normally is the domain of the operative system, and the driver making decision of what kind of systems the browser will support. The more rational behavior is for chromium to let the operative system decide what software and drivers they want to use, and do what they want with bugs from operative sys…

> Chromium making decision about drivers which normally is the domain of the operative system

Chromium isn't loading their own graphics drivers. They are deciding to fall back to software rendering if they determine that the card/driver/OS combination does not properly support the API that enables them to use the hardware-acceleration features of the card to render. They're still rendering using the noveau driver on the OS, they're just not using the APIs that they have determined to be not functioning properly. Detecting what the underlying graphics hardware and driver supports and falling back to what is functional is an incredibly common part of software using GPUs.

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