632578 - Despite WebGL being (re)enabled in Firefox 4.0b11 on Linux, still doesn't work

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 624593

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Tom Chiverton]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:2.0b11) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0b11
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:2.0b11) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0b11

Every site I go to to try WebGL out gives some varient of 'failed to create WebGL context'.
The above URL spits out 'Error: gl is undefined
Source File: http://learningwebgl.com/lessons/lesson02/index.html
Line: 71' to the console.

All my prefs in about:config with 'webgl' in are the defaults.

KDE4.6 on Kubuntu.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Visit URL
Actual Results:  
Error messages

Expected Results:  
Something drawn

Comment 1

[Tom Chiverton]

Running from the command line gives:

Failed to open VDPAU backend libvdpau_nvidia.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
Failed to open VDPAU backend libvdpau_nvidia.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
[GLX] currently only allowing the NVIDIA proprietary driver, as other drivers are giving too many crashes. To bypass this, define the MOZ_GLX_IGNORE_BLACKLIST environment variable.
[GLX] currently only allowing the NVIDIA proprietary driver, as other drivers are giving too many crashes. To bypass this, define the MOZ_GLX_IGNORE_BLACKLIST environment variable.
Running global cleanup code from study base classes.

I have no idea why it is talking about NVIDIA. This is an Intel laptop.

I ran 
export MOZ_GLX_IGNORE_BLACKLIST=1

and now the test URL runs fine.
Is this a packaging issue, where the actual FireFox packages will define this variable in the start-up script ?
Is this a communication issue, because this message hardly anyone will see about 'only works on NVIDA cards' is at odds with the impression given in the 4.0b11 release announcement of 'WebGL now works on Linux'. If it's only working on sub-set of video cards, where is this displayed ? How is the communication going to be improved ?

Comment 2

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

(In reply to comment #1)
> Running from the command line gives:
> 
> Failed to open VDPAU backend libvdpau_nvidia.so: cannot open shared object
> file: No such file or directory
> Failed to open VDPAU backend libvdpau_nvidia.so: cannot open shared object
> file: No such file or directory
> [GLX] currently only allowing the NVIDIA proprietary driver, as other drivers
> are giving too many crashes. To bypass this, define the
> MOZ_GLX_IGNORE_BLACKLIST environment variable.
> [GLX] currently only allowing the NVIDIA proprietary driver, as other drivers
> are giving too many crashes. To bypass this, define the
> MOZ_GLX_IGNORE_BLACKLIST environment variable.
> Running global cleanup code from study base classes.
> 
> I have no idea why it is talking about NVIDIA. This is an Intel laptop.
> 
> I ran 
> export MOZ_GLX_IGNORE_BLACKLIST=1
> 
> and now the test URL runs fine.

Great, can you then run the WebGL test suite:
https://cvs.khronos.org/svn/repos/registry/trunk/public/webgl/sdk/tests/webgl-conformance-tests.html
and let me know if your Intel driver manages to complete it without crashing. So far I've heard of only one report of a WebGL test suite success with Intel driver, and that was with Ubuntu 11.04. For example, all reports from Ubuntu 10.10 were crashes. That's why the Intel driver is not currently whitelisted.

I would like to whitelist specifically any new version that works, but whitelisting specific driver versions is extremely hard to do on X11, see below.

The only reason why we whitelist only NVIDIA, is that only NVIDIA drivers are able to complete the WebGL test suite regardless of the driver version. In a future Firefox version we'll be able to whitelist new drivers based on driver version, but that's hard to do on X11, see below.

> Is this a packaging issue, where the actual FireFox packages will define this
> variable in the start-up script ?
> Is this a communication issue, because this message hardly anyone will see
> about 'only works on NVIDA cards' is at odds with the impression given in the
> 4.0b11 release announcement of 'WebGL now works on Linux'.

I didn't know about this announcement. I don't think that any one-sentence statement can appropriately summarize the WebGL/linux situation at the moment.

> If it's only working
> on sub-set of video cards, where is this displayed ? How is the communication
> going to be improved ?

We're in discussion between Mozilla, Google/Chromium, and Mesa/Xorg developers to improver the situation.
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/mesa-dev/2011-February/005267.html
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/mesa-dev/2011-January/004877.html

We do blacklists on all platform, X11 is not a special case in this respect. Where X11 is special is the relative scarcity of OpenGL implementations able to pass the WebGL test suite, and even more importantly, the difficulty of retrieving driver information to safely whitelist drivers (see first mesa-dev link above) where 'safely' means 'without risking crashing'. Things are moving quickly, just not quickly enough for the Firefox 4.0 release.