
GPUVideoDecode on Linux is impossible without patching - herpderperator
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=463440
======
DannyBee
This bug was closed three years ago, with the following

"Today we don't have a Linux GPU decode owner, so we have chosen not to
activate something which we have no one to support and may have to break
arbitrarily in the future for ChromeOS."

Is there anything to suggest that has changed?

Did someone offer to do it and were turned down?

I've seen patches but no offer to maintain the subsystem, etc that i can find.
But maybe i missed it? I only did a few searches of the relevant mailing
lists.

(Also, in my experience commenting on 3 year old closed bugs is not the way to
make anything happen)

(For those wondering, the actual patch set appears to be tracked here:
[https://chromium-
review.googlesource.com/c/chromium/src/+/53...](https://chromium-
review.googlesource.com/c/chromium/src/+/532294) )

~~~
Lerc
>(Also, in my experience commenting on 3 year old closed bugs is not the way
to make anything happen)

Perhaps not, but this seems to be the only avenue available to many.

What would you suggest people who encounter a problem such as this do if they
personally don't have the ability to personally fix the problem themselves?

This isn't an issue specific to chromium or even google. There are a lot of
projects that seem to have an inside and an outside with those on the outside
rightly-or-wrongly feeling unheard.

~~~
DannyBee
"What would you suggest people who encounter a problem such as this do if they
personally don't have the ability to personally fix the problem themselves?"

There's a difference between getting someone's attention, and then them
disagreeing with you.

If you are trying to get attention, i'd go with the mailing list in this
situation.

If they just disagree with you, sometimes, you gotta accept that someone
doesn't agree with you about the product vision and let it go (this assumes
your constraints - they don't have ability/time to fix themselves). They will
either be right or wrong, and it will succeed or fail.

"This isn't an issue specific to chromium or even google. There are a lot of
projects that seem to have an inside and an outside with those on the outside
rightly-or-wrongly feeling unheard."

Sure, and i think companies/people should be very clear with governance
models, participation models, etc. I also think they should be very clear
about things like this.

Actually one of the hugest clashes i often see is open source projects that
_do_ have a product vision end up clashing with minorities of their user bases
who don't fit in that product vision (either due to changes or never fitting
in the first place), etc. Those clashes often seem much more emotional for
people.

(I honestly don't know enough about chrome anymore at all to know whether
that's the case. I'm only talking about the general situation you are
describing).

A lot of the inside vs outside cases that i've seen fall into "product vision
decided inside, you are welcome to participate if you want but we aren't
changing it" style of project.

It's more rare (though i've seen it) to see "we have no vision of where we are
trying to go but we still are going to semi-ignore random contributions/etc.
We're gonna make it so you think we might care, but not actually try enough
that anything happens "

Worse, a lot of the time the latter prevents other competing projects from
existing because people spend time trying with the existing one then are too
burned out to do anything else.

The product ones often at least give straight answers, even if people hate the
answers.

------
oconnore
This seems totally reasonable. Google is primarily focused on building Chrome
-- a product, with business oriented product goals. Anyone using Chromium has
already agreed to be a tag-along. That was always part of the deal.

In general I find the category of folks who -- won't use Firefox, but want to
pretend they're not basically just using Google Chrome -- to be very strange
indeed.

~~~
horsawlarway
I mean, there's a whole host of browsers based on chromium that are not
chrome:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromium_(web_browser)#Other_b...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromium_\(web_browser\)#Other_browsers_based_on_Chromium)

That said, I agree that you're basically just using chrome.

I happen to use chromium for work because I do development for extensions and
it's nice to keep chrome around as my primary test browser and chromium as my
daily driver.

Plus I can dig through the source on chromium and recompile locally
(admittedly, not super fun) to see if I might suggest additional extension
features/apis.

------
Palomides
afaik Firefox doesn't do GPU accelerated anything on Linux either (ref:
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1210726](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1210726)
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1210727](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1210727)
)

~~~
cbdumas
Which is by far the biggest pain point of using Ubuntu on my XPS 13. YouTube
absolutely destroys battery life if I watch it in my browser. Only solution
I've found is to watch Youtube videos with mpv, but I feel a bit bad about
that because it deprives the creators of ad revenue.

------
ensiferum
Before anyone chimes in with "just fork chrome".. just to give you an idea of
the magnitude of the project. The chromium source code has some 16k cpp source
files. Millions of lines of code. All the libraries combined the source
advancea at a rate of thousand commits a day. You fork chromium now and
tomorrow you're already way behind on merging upstream changes. It takes
serious engineering effort just to be able to build that behemoth.

And yes the OpenGL drivers are unstable and no, Khronos CTS passing doesnt
mean anything wrt stability. The most trusted gfx platform is currently DX11
backend in libAngle.

~~~
curt15
>It takes serious engineering effort just to be able to build that behemoth.

Not to mention resources. System requirements for building on Linux:

" >>A 64-bit Intel machine with at least 8GB of RAM. More than 16GB is highly
recommended.

>>At least 100GB of free disk space."

[https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/docs...](https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/docs/linux_build_instructions.md)

~~~
sliken
Heh, amusing about the memory requirements. The vast majority of chromebooks
are 4GB ram. I suspect less than 1% are 8GB ram (they cost 3x as much as the
4GB models).

~~~
ensiferum
The large memory requirement is mostly due to the linker. Not a runtime
requirement per se.

------
kabwj
Imposible to read this page from an iPhone. Can’t zoom out.

------
krn
Isn't ChromeOS based on Linux, and, therefore, all Chromebooks affected by
this?

~~~
noir_lord
If you read the comments someone points out that they are using the exact same
drivers for intel stuff on ChromeOS that people like me are using on on
Thinkpads (it has an nvidia GPU but I rarely use it, next machine won't have)
with no issues.

Not sure what is up with Chromium just recently in light of the potentially
breaking adblockers thing but I'm happy that Firefox are back in the game (not
that I ever stopped using them, Chrome/Chromium is only for dev and testing on
my machines) since the single largest browser vendor also depending on
advertising for the vast majority of it's income is a massive conflict of
interest frankly.

Firefox for Android has gotten really good and with ublock origin and the lack
of constant "sync everything to google forever" nagging makes mobile web much
more pleasant.

~~~
basch
isnt Firefox planning that same ad blocking breaking change?

[https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2018/10/26/firefox-chrome-
an...](https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2018/10/26/firefox-chrome-and-the-
future-of-trustworthy-extensions/)

~~~
spullara
On that page they say "Extensions that request access to all websites still
get installed with that access, so the default behavior has not changed." That
seems counter to the whole discussion about Chrome's changes yesterday.

------
scythe
Since Opera is based on Chromium, could they add hardware acceleration and use
it to get an edge?

------
newnewpdro
Stop using Chrome.

~~~
aairey
Use Firefox.

~~~
AstralStorm
Same problem, because webrtc.

Now if you had a patch vs Firefox that actually makes libva usable for
everything, sure, go ahead, even add a checkbox in settings.

------
shmerl
I wish Firefox would already implement GPU accelerated video decoding /
encoding. Right now WebRTC is very CPU heavy since acceleration is missing
completely.

------
rektide
Cowards.

------
21
What about using the Windows GPU code and then going through the Steam Proton
Windows to Linux layer?

~~~
loeg
This seems worse in every way than just enabling libvaapi, which is already
somewhat supported, except for being specifically disabled on non-ChromeOS
Linux.

------
sigi45
It sucks.

