1274686 - Enable GL layers on Intel Linux gen7+

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Core :: Graphics: Layers, task, P3)

Description

[Thomas Daede [:TD-Linux]]

I have been using Nightly for several months with GL layers force enabled and the experience is much better than basic layers, which is slow and causes diagonal tearing (bug 1127910).

The current combo I have is Intel HD 4600 graphics, and Mesa 11.1:
OpenGL vendor string: Intel Open Source Technology Center
OpenGL renderer string: Mesa DRI Intel(R) Haswell Mobile 
OpenGL core profile version string: 3.3 (Core Profile) Mesa 11.1.0 (git-525f3c2)

The only regression I know of is bug 1260922 which will cause window sizes greater than 4096x4096 to break. I am not sure if this should block or not as this is pretty rare.

Comment 1

[Anthony Jones (:ajones, :kentuckyfriedtakahe, :k17e)]

Milan - how do you feel about defaulting the "Use hardware acceleration when available" setting in about:preferences#advanced to false but making it so that enabling it turns on GL layers?

Comment 2

[Milan Sreckovic [:milan] (needinfo for best results)]

Indeed - if it was only the 4k x 4k screens that didn't work, it could work.  There are a few bugs that we're tracking, and probably a few we didn't link yet: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/showdependencytree.cgi?id=594876&hide_resolved=1 .  I'm not convinced we're that close, though it's possible. We're still dealing with GTK3 leftover issues, so once those are mostly cleared out, we can see what remains.

Anthony - good suggestion, but we'd need to check what turning acceleration off would do to WebGL.  Does video care about it?

Comment 3

[Thomas Daede [:TD-Linux]]

I've updated the title to differentiate this bug from bug 594876.

WebGL is currently HW accelerated and works with GL layers off (the default) or on. There is no fast texture sharing path between processes afaik, so performance isn't great on either.

Video is much improved with GL layers, especially in fullscreen. Removing the XRender backend was a large regression for video for me because of the reduced performance and tearing - GL layers fixes it.

Comment 4

[Marco Castelluccio [:marco]]

I can confirm that enabling OpenGL layers fixed tearing problems for me that were caused by disabling xrender (bug 1247935).

Comment 5

[Darkspirit]

(In reply to Thomas Daede [:TD-Linux] from comment #0)

Intel HD 4600 graphics

Qualified for WebRender since bug 1543217 and bug 1525128.