The Google Chrome OS

Posted Jul 8, 2009 16:59 UTC (Wed) by micka (subscriber, #38720)
In reply to: The Google Chrome OS by drag
Parent article: The Google Chrome OS

> A framebuffer-only windowing system will be substantially more inefficient
> then X... It would eliminate your ability to play any sort of game, have
> good video playback, etc etc. The major side effects would be much larger
> increase in CPU usage and dramatically lowered battery life.

Google seems to have some big plans for the web browser. Maybe they hope they can make them run any sort of program. Just take a look at
http://code.google.com/intl/fr/apis/o3d/
It's a plugin that adds javascript bindings to the browser. With that, they could even write something like compiz, games, etc.

The Google Chrome OS

Posted Jul 8, 2009 17:24 UTC (Wed) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (2 responses)

Javascript bindings don't mean squat unless you have something to accelerate them. I don't care if the game is 3D, in your browser, or full screen 2D or anything like that or outside the browser or anything like that. It's irrelevant.

A framebuffer driver is just that.. you take information and you write it out to a framebuffer. It's a memory region. It does not get you any sort of OpenGL acceleration or hardware scaling or accelerated YUV to RGB conversion or anything like that. Your worse off, efficiency-wise, with a plain FB driver then you were back in VGA graphics days.

Xorg provides a framework for 2D and 3D acceleration. It's almost always going to have better performance then a simple FB driver unless something is severely broken.

If you don't want to use Xorg then you have to replace it with something else.

Wayland is a possibility and it provides it's own 2D and 3D acceleration whatnot. But it's not mature.

The Google Chrome OS

Posted Jul 8, 2009 19:55 UTC (Wed) by endecotp (guest, #36428) [Link] (1 responses)

drag, you might like to have a look at e.g. DirectFB.

The Google Chrome OS

Posted Jul 8, 2009 20:44 UTC (Wed) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

Oh. Thank you for pointing that out. I have forgotten about that and it does look like it's under development still, which is a bit surprising.

Apologies to above people if they were thinking about DirectFB instead of just a plain "framebuffer".