A Taste of WebGPU in Firefox
hacks.mozilla.org
A Taste of WebGPU in Firefox
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Re: A Taste of WebGPU in Firefox
#2Will this API be opt-in, or can we expect another security disaster like with WebGL?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16457791 , https://www.contextis.com/en/blog/webgl-a-new-dimension-for-... , https://www.contextis.com/en/blog/webgl-more-webgl-security-...
Edit I should have given a quote from one of the articles covering the issue, so here's one:
> anyone running Firefox 4 with WebGL support is vulnerable to having malicious web pages capture screenshots of any window on their system
Re: A Taste of WebGPU in Firefox
#3Will this API be opt-in, or can we expect another security disaster like with WebGL? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16457791 , https://www.contextis.com/en/blog/webgl-a-new-dimension-for-... , https://www.contextis.com/en/blog/webgl-more-webgl-security-... Edit I should have given a quote from one of the articles covering the issue, so here's one: > anyone running Firefox 4 with WebGL support is vulnerable to h…
It's up to the browser to decide if it's enabled by default at some point in the future. There is nothing in a Web API saying that it has to be forcefully enabled.
I do share the concern that security of talking to the GPUs is hard. We'll do our best. I think it's important for the Web platform to reach this capability.
Interestingly, the implementations are more diverse, because there isn't a single Angle-like library that everyone is going to use. This may mean that it's easier to find a vulnerability in a concrete browser, but harder to make an exploit that works portably.
Re: A Taste of WebGPU in Firefox
#4Will this API be opt-in, or can we expect another security disaster like with WebGL? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16457791 , https://www.contextis.com/en/blog/webgl-a-new-dimension-for-... , https://www.contextis.com/en/blog/webgl-more-webgl-security-... Edit I should have given a quote from one of the articles covering the issue, so here's one: > anyone running Firefox 4 with WebGL support is vulnerable to h…
Whether or not the API is opt-in is orthogonal to its security hardening - this is a false dichotomy.
Re: A Taste of WebGPU in Firefox
#5Will this API be opt-in, or can we expect another security disaster like with WebGL? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16457791 , https://www.contextis.com/en/blog/webgl-a-new-dimension-for-... , https://www.contextis.com/en/blog/webgl-more-webgl-security-... Edit I should have given a quote from one of the articles covering the issue, so here's one: > anyone running Firefox 4 with WebGL support is vulnerable to h…
Fingerprinting is one security concern.
Re: A Taste of WebGPU in Firefox
#6I know some people coded up raytracers with glsl texture shaders, but rayracers are massive parrallel with no shared state needed algorithms (the entire scene is tiny in those examples). Would this new API enable shared state (to some extent)? For example, someone may want to solve numerically the diff equation of the liquid flow. This usually involves dealing with big lattices where parts of the lattices can be updated in parallel, but on the edges, there need to be some data sharing involved. Same question, but for multiplying big matrices, as many of those numerical methods allow to reduce the task to multiplying huge matrices.
Re: A Taste of WebGPU in Firefox
#7I know some people coded up raytracers with glsl texture shaders, but rayracers are massive parrallel with no shared state needed algorithms (the entire scene is tiny in those examples). Would this new API enable shared state (to some extent)? For example, someone may want to solve numerically the diff equation of the liquid flow. This usually involves dealing with big lattices where parts of the lattices can be upda…
Yes, compute shaders will enable slightly more ability to do computations that are less parallel than just fragment shaders can handle.
Re: A Taste of WebGPU in Firefox
#8I know some people coded up raytracers with glsl texture shaders, but rayracers are massive parrallel with no shared state needed algorithms (the entire scene is tiny in those examples). Would this new API enable shared state (to some extent)? For example, someone may want to solve numerically the diff equation of the liquid flow. This usually involves dealing with big lattices where parts of the lattices can be upda…
We are exposing writable storage buffers and textures in all shader stages (there is a caveat discussion [1] on the topic though), which means you can write data out directly. Sharing data between shader threads can be efficiently in the compute shaders (via the shared group memory), which are included in the core of WebGPU.
P.S. vange-rs [2] is written on wgpu-rs and uses ray-tracing in fragment shaders for the terrain. I hope to run it in the browser one day!
[1] https://github.com/gpuweb/gpuweb/issues/639
[2] https://github.com/kvark/vange-rsRe: A Taste of WebGPU in Firefox
#9Will this API be opt-in, or can we expect another security disaster like with WebGL? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16457791 , https://www.contextis.com/en/blog/webgl-a-new-dimension-for-... , https://www.contextis.com/en/blog/webgl-more-webgl-security-... Edit I should have given a quote from one of the articles covering the issue, so here's one: > anyone running Firefox 4 with WebGL support is vulnerable to h…
Whether or not the API is opt-in is orthogonal to its security hardening - this is a false dichotomy.
But that's not what parent was saying, I think. He was saying that WebGL not being opt-in was a security disaster; while saying nothing about the security hardening of the WebGL module itself.
Even when a module is well tested, I'd like non-essential modules to be opt-in too.
Re: A Taste of WebGPU in Firefox
#10Will this API be opt-in, or can we expect another security disaster like with WebGL? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16457791 , https://www.contextis.com/en/blog/webgl-a-new-dimension-for-... , https://www.contextis.com/en/blog/webgl-more-webgl-security-... Edit I should have given a quote from one of the articles covering the issue, so here's one: > anyone running Firefox 4 with WebGL support is vulnerable to h…
Fingerprinting is one security concern.
Security implications are always good to point out, though this is not unique to webGPU at all. Some fingerprinting techniques don't even require enabling javascript.