32-bit only [LWN.net]

32-bit only

Posted May 15, 2008 23:09 UTC (Thu) by proski (subscriber, #104)
Parent article: Adobe releases Flash Player 10 beta

They still don't get it or their code is really, really messy and cannot be recompiled for other architectures.

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32-bit only

Posted May 15, 2008 23:33 UTC (Thu) by ilmari (subscriber, #14175) [Link]

The ActionScript (the ECMAScript dialect used in Flash) VM uses JIT compilation, so it's not just a matter of recompiling, but retargeting the JIT compiler backend to a new architecture.

BTW, Adobe released the VM, Tamarin, as free software, and it's being integrated into SpiderMonkey and hence all Mozilla-based products.

32-bit only

Posted May 16, 2008 10:27 UTC (Fri) by jengelh (subscriber, #33263) [Link]

Wonderful. All we need is yet another fscking VM.
Even so, the JIT engine should have been "deintregated" so as to have the main executable
(read: browser plugin and standalone player) as 64-bit, resulting in much less 32-bit
dependencies in my packaging system.
But then again... the Adobe Flash implementation is so fscking slow (no Xv acceleration, no
optimized video decoding²) it probably does not matter anyhow.

²Given that MPlayer can do it (youtube videos) with about 15% CPU of the Athlon
XP/Thoroughbred, I really start to wonder why Flash needs more than 4-fold of that, maxing out
the CPU.

32-bit only

Posted May 17, 2008 12:33 UTC (Sat) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]

Because it needs to render RGB data on top of the video, which can't be done sanely if you're
using a YUV overlay. Not to mention the fact that most hardware only lets you use one overlay
at once.

32-bit only

Posted May 17, 2008 13:32 UTC (Sat) by jengelh (subscriber, #33263) [Link]

>Because it needs to render RGB data on top of the video, which can't be done sanely if you're
using a YUV overlay.

It can be done. schismtracker, which only uses RGB, converts this to YUV2 using SDL, and I can
live with that. Throwing in a video should be a no brainer.

>Not to mention the fact that most hardware only lets you use one overlay at once.

I am aware of that limitation. On dedicated embedded appliances, we know there is only one
Flash drawing window open at any time, so it would be a big win. As for the home user, Adobe
could simply start out with X11 output for all video windows and add an option to the
right-click menu to enable Xv on a specific window so that at least the main window of Youtube
where many-fps video actually plays can be accelerated.