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The VESA driver?



How does llvmpipe do these days? I remember being excited about it ~5 years ago and I can only imagine both LLVM performance and CPU speeds have gone up.


llvmpipe is the gpu part, not the display part of the graphic card.

Otherwise, when using it in KVM VM, it can run the desktop compositor quite nicely.


But that's the part that's crashing. I'm suggesting Chrome use llvmpipe to do whatever they needed hardware acceleration for, generate a single boring texture on a single big rectangle, and pass that through to the graphics driver. That way Chrome itself isn't loading the Nouveau libGL and is much more insulated from incompatibilities between Chrome and Nouveau, whosever fault it might be.


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.


That's what swiftshader does.


Whoa, I totally missed that! https://blog.chromium.org/2016/06/universal-rendering-with-s... So is it the case that you get decent (though perhaps not great) WebGL performance even if you have no GL-compatible graphics driver at all?

Then are Nouveau users only losing performance and not functionality as a result of this Google decision?


I didn't look at the bugs at issue, but I rather doubt mode switching is what Chromium cares about. It's sure to be video decode or GPU output.




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