584536 - need a driver whitelist and blacklist for OpenGL, D2D and D3D drivers

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 591486

(Core :: Graphics, defect)

Description

[Christopher Blizzard (:blizzard)]

We're going to need a remote driver whitelist and blacklist for OpenGL, D2D and D3D drivers.  This includes both a server component and a client component.

1. This is largely a problem on windows where there's a variety of drivers for opengl support.
2. We're going to be using D3D compositing with Firefox 4, and we might have issues there.
3. Same with D2D since we're mapping canvas operations directly into D2D operations.

Early idea is to have something like what we do for DLL blacklisting.

Comment 1

[Reed Loden [:reed]]

Current DLL blacklisting is completely client-side within toolkit/xre/nsWindowsDllBlocklist.cpp. There is no server-side besides shipping a new version of Firefox.

Comment 2

[Joe Drew (not getting mail)]

This is how we should do driver blacklisting, IMO. Server-side is too much work for not enough gain.

Comment 3

[Vladimir Vukicevic [:vlad] [:vladv] (needinfo me, slow to respond)]

Well, we'd like to find out how much work it actually is, e.g. sending it along with the regular addons blocklist ping.  Server-side lets us be a lot more agile in dealing with problems; otherwise we have to essentially do a full-on firedrill.

Comment 4

[Dave Townsend [:mossop]]

(In reply to comment #3)
> Well, we'd like to find out how much work it actually is, e.g. sending it along
> with the regular addons blocklist ping.  Server-side lets us be a lot more
> agile in dealing with problems; otherwise we have to essentially do a full-on
> firedrill.

It would probably not be terribly difficult assuming all you care about is that any changes to the blocklist take effect the next time Firefox restarts and you don't care about UI.

One of the important questions is whether you need the blocklist data before XPCOM comes up or not.

Comment 5

[Joe Drew (not getting mail)]

Alright, well, let's start with some way of blacklisting (or whitelisting) drivers given a list from on high. We can enhance this to support remote updates at a later date.

Comment 6

[Bas Schouten (:bas.schouten)]

(In reply to comment #5)
> Alright, well, let's start with some way of blacklisting (or whitelisting)
> drivers given a list from on high. We can enhance this to support remote
> updates at a later date.

Our initial idea was blacklist for DX10 cards (i.e. assume DX10 cards are good, unless told otherwise), and whitelist for DX9 cards (i.e. assume DX9 cards won't work too well, unless told otherwise).

We should keep in mind we don't just want to select on driver version, but also the type of device.

Comment 7

[Christopher Blizzard (:blizzard)]

Please have a look at the other bugs hanging off of bug 575738 for other related switches that we're likely to need (global switch, crash reporting information, etc.)

Comment 8

[Bas Schouten (:bas.schouten)]

Is this blocking Beta4 or not? I thought we we're going to enable on all DX10 hardware, and take it from there?

Comment 9

[Vladimir Vukicevic [:vlad] [:vladv] (needinfo me, slow to respond)]

I do not think this needs to block b4.  I think it needs to be done, though.

Comment 11

[Benoit Jacob [:bjacob] (mostly away)]

FWIW, I've started gathering data. It's also useful when handling incoming graphics bug report...

    https://wiki.mozilla.org/User:Bjacob