LWN: Comments on "Firefox 4 Beta 9 Gives Short Shrift to Linux Users (PCWorld)"

Firefox 4 Beta 9 Gives Short Shrift to Linux Users (PCWorld)

SteveAdept — Sun, 23 Jan 2011 02:37:13 +0000

Agreed. I've gone out of my way to buy a particular laptop because it has an Nvidia video chipset. Their Linux driver may not be perfect, but for my money, it's better than all the alternatives.

Firefox 4 Beta 9 Gives Short Shrift to Linux Users (PCWorld)

zlynx — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 15:56:33 +0000

It's fast.

It implements the OpenGL standards correctly and is one of the only drivers to do so.

Nvidia has actual teams of people who test their driver quality using well-designed test suites that cover all the possibilities. Not two developers and a few beta users that only test Tuxracer, glxgears and Compiz.

In my personal experiences the Nvidia driver is very stable. Just don't run it with 4K kernel stacks.

All in all, Nvidia and its Linux driver is the *very best* advanced graphics support available for Linux.

I'm not seeing the lack of quality here.

Firefox 4 Beta 9 Gives Short Shrift to Linux Users (PCWorld)

ssam — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 15:21:18 +0000

there is also the Grafx Bot plug-in that does a bunch of rendering tests. see:
http://jagriffin.wordpress.com/2010/08/30/introducting-gr...
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/grafx-bot/

Firefox 4 Beta 9 Gives Short Shrift to Linux Users (PCWorld)

mjthayer — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 09:46:20 +0000

> > Are any DDX drivers actually using it?

> AFAIK it _is_ a DDX driver.

Ah, I had assumed from my limited knowledge of Gallium3D that it would only become a DDX driver once it (the state tracker) was combined with a given Gallium3D driver.

Firefox 4 Beta 9 Gives Short Shrift to Linux Users (PCWorld)

ernstp — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 09:32:49 +0000

> Is that in a usable state?

Not really I think, but I read that someone had tried it and sounded like it runs and works partially at least.

> Are any DDX drivers actually using it?

AFAIK it _is_ a DDX driver.

Firefox 4 Beta 9 Gives Short Shrift to Linux Users (PCWorld)

mjthayer — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 08:38:14 +0000

> This "one DDX for X on Linux" is called Gallium Xorg state tracker.

Is that in a usable state? Are any DDX drivers actually using it?

Firefox 4 Beta 9 Gives Short Shrift to Linux Users (PCWorld)

mslusarz — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 17:48:10 +0000

This "one DDX for X on Linux" is called Gallium Xorg state tracker.

Linux 3D drivers

Adi — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 14:08:31 +0000

Yet, at that time it was KWin and KDE that got bashed, despite clearly explaining where the true problem is.

Firefox 4 Beta 9 Gives Short Shrift to Linux Users (PCWorld)

bjacob — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 13:45:34 +0000

I just wanted to let you know that lots of stuff is happening at the moment. Xorg devs have reproduced and confirmed the crashes, but they have also noted that aside from these, the free drivers pass the test suite very well, so really it seems that we're only a couple of crashes away from whitelisting drivers. Moreover, it also seems that there's stuff we could try to do in Firefox to avoid triggering these driver crashes, potentially allowing us to remove the blacklist altogether.

Firefox 4 Beta 9 Gives Short Shrift to Linux Users (PCWorld)

bjacob — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 13:43:12 +0000

Of course there will always be. Go to about:config and set webgl.enabled_for_all_sites = false. This preference name may change once before the 4.0 final release (to "disabled" and "force-enabled" prefs).

Firefox 4 Beta 9 Gives Short Shrift to Linux Users (PCWorld)

bjacob — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 13:40:12 +0000

It does have at least one freedesktop bug link in the first email. I could have posted a couple more, but the mozilla.bugzilla.org bugs just had more information on them because that's where our users tend to post.

Firefox 4 Beta 9 Gives Short Shrift to Linux Users (PCWorld)

jeroen — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 12:54:08 +0000

I upgraded the bios to the latest version a month ago and it didn't help.

Firefox 4 Beta 9 Gives Short Shrift to Linux Users (PCWorld)

chris.wilson — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 12:18:20 +0000

Remind me. Which bug are you referring to?

Firefox 4 Beta 9 Gives Short Shrift to Linux Users (PCWorld)

rbrito — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 11:47:32 +0000

> Call me ignorant, but why is HW accelerated video necessary in a Web browser? Embedded videos?

Call me ignorant too, but it is my vague understanding that the GPU acts as a co-processor to handle some operations.

Firefox 4 Beta 9 Gives Short Shrift to Linux Users (PCWorld)

drag — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 11:29:19 +0000

Are you thinking of 'Gallium'?

Yeah something like that. I mispoke a bit, we don't need to get rid of 'X Windows' so much as getting rid of X windows having anything to do with graphics drivers.

There should only be one DDX for X on Linux and it should be 'DDX Linux' (or whatever). The same X driver code running on all the different video cards.

Then lower down there should only be one driver for one piece of hardware. Do it's job and do it well with proper layered design of *kernel* <--> *graphics driver* <---> *applications* and all that happy Unixy design stuff.

Firefox 4 Beta 9 Gives Short Shrift to Linux Users (PCWorld)

mjthayer — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 10:53:00 +0000

> Get rid of X Windows Server and switch to a driver model were you have one driver that supports many different APIs then you will start to see major improvement. There is only so much you can do to band-aid over broken design.
What was that metal again? Palladium? Titanium? Platinum?

Firefox 4 Beta 9 Gives Short Shrift to Linux Users (PCWorld)

drag — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 10:39:20 +0000

Nvidia is hardly quality. It's fast and provides a better API then open source drivers do, but it's not something that is quality.

The trouble we have is that the X Windows Server has a batshit insane driver model. You have 3 or 4 different drivers programmed by different groups that all try to do similar things with the same single piece of hardware.

Get rid of X Windows Server and switch to a driver model were you have one driver that supports many different APIs then you will start to see major improvement. There is only so much you can do to band-aid over broken design.

Also the other major issue with Linux and open source drivers is that despite all the rhetoric and grandstanding when it comes to software the average Linux user does not mind shoveling massive amounts of Windows driver code into their kernel in order to get acceptable graphics performance.

Not only does this remove any motivation for actually fixing anything (since it now works well enough) it also prevents the very thing that would be the first real step to fixing Linux drivers. Any changes to or modifications to X or Linux graphics in a attempt to fix anything will break the Nvidia driver and cause users to cry out bloody murder.

Firefox 4 Beta 9 Gives Short Shrift to Linux Users (PCWorld)

drag — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 10:32:10 +0000

> If only it was so easy. At least one of my X crashes has been reported for months, and reconfirmed on every X server or Intel driver update, without hope. And these are the open drivers, on fairly standard hardware (Lenovo X200s).

It's not easy. It's relatively simple. I never said it was easy. People easily confuse simple with easy and they are completely separate things. I know it's extremely difficult and that why it's not been fixed yet.

Firefox 4 Beta 9 Gives Short Shrift to Linux Users (PCWorld)

tao — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 10:11:51 +0000

BIOS issue?

Firefox 4 Beta 9 Gives Short Shrift to Linux Users (PCWorld)

pabs — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 09:28:15 +0000

I hope there will be a knob to disable WebGL altogether, this is an attack surface expansion that I definitely do *not* want. HTML5 seems to contain a lot of those.

Firefox 4 Beta 9 Gives Short Shrift to Linux Users (PCWorld)

Los__D — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 07:50:47 +0000

without the video's resolution, any figures are pretty useless...

Also, my netbook (Samsung N210) plays videos fine in the browser, unless you fullsreen them, so the amount of scaling is probably also useful.

Firefox 4 Beta 9 Gives Short Shrift to Linux Users (PCWorld)

ssmith32 — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 07:03:23 +0000

I just enabled software rendering for WebGL. No buggy drivers to deal with, and I'm still getting 50-60 fps on several WebGL demos. This is on a 5 year-old MacBook running Ubuntu. It's a little annoying that it doesn't just default to software rendering on linux, but, once configured, it works fine. Nothing is really "broken" here.

Firefox 4 Beta 9 Gives Short Shrift to Linux Users (PCWorld)

jiu — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 05:45:43 +0000

I agree with this, buggy graphics drivers were the reason I switched to Mac a year ago (hoping it would be temporary). The improvements seem to always come too late, when the graphics card and/or the laptop itself are close to being 'obsolete'. The only maker which stands out for the quality of their linux driver is nvidia, and they're closed source - how come intel and AMD don't just put more people on it?

Firefox 4 Beta 9 Gives Short Shrift to Linux Users (PCWorld)

ernstp — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 05:45:05 +0000

Ok, but this: http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/mesa-dev/2011-Janua...
was posted after the OSNews article and doesn't contain any links to any freedesktop.org bugs, only to internal bugzilla.mozilla.org bugs. But I haven't digged any deeper into it...

Firefox 4 Beta 9 Gives Short Shrift to Linux Users (PCWorld)

jeroen — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 01:33:49 +0000

I've also got an X200s and sometimes X crashes on resume from suspend-to-ram. It happens about 5-10 percent of the time. A friend of mine also has an X200s and uses the same distro (Ubuntu 10.10) and doesn't have this problem, so at least not everyone has it. I've never reported it because I don't have more information than "it doesn't work after resume"...

Firefox 4 Beta 9 Gives Short Shrift to Linux Users (PCWorld)

xorbe — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 00:36:57 +0000

Basically 3D mode is becoming the norm, and 2D mode is going the way of the dodo, correct?

(Remember when the nVidia GF8 was significantly slower than the 7-series in 2D due to removed functionality? [w/x.org, not windows])

Linux 3D drivers

kripkenstein — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 00:09:01 +0000

> Sounds like they're running into what KDE4 developers ran into.

And those trying to run 3D games on Linux.

Firefox 4 Beta 9 Gives Short Shrift to Linux Users (PCWorld)

dtlin — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 00:01:08 +0000

WebGL / HTML5 canvas's 3D drawing context rather obviously benefit from 3D acceleration. Google Body Browser is one such demonstration.

CSS3 transforms and the canvas's 2D drawing context can benefit from hardware acceleration too, especially since they can be applied to video playback.

Firefox 4 Beta 9 Gives Short Shrift to Linux Users (PCWorld)

pr1268 — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 23:25:36 +0000

Call me ignorant, but why is HW accelerated video necessary in a Web browser? Embedded videos?

(I do use the proprietary Adobe Flash plugin with Firefox 3.6.x, and I've compiled MPlayer and MPlayerplug-in from source, but I thought they used the underlying X video driver[s]. I could certainly stand to be enlightened about how the Web browser renders video.)

Firefox 4 Beta 9 Gives Short Shrift to Linux Users (PCWorld)

tao — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 22:55:51 +0000

Seeing as I have an X200s too, I'm curious as to what crash you're seeing? I haven't experienced any crashes so far. Do you have a link to your bug report?

Firefox 4 Beta 9 Gives Short Shrift to Linux Users (PCWorld)

lmb — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 21:59:31 +0000

If only it was so easy. At least one of my X crashes has been reported for months, and reconfirmed on every X server or Intel driver update, without hope. And these are the open drivers, on fairly standard hardware (Lenovo X200s).

The state of X drivers is really a mess, and it seems to be understaffed everywhere, and the proliferation of different hardware and generations and minor variations does not help at all.

Firefox 4 Beta 9 Gives Short Shrift to Linux Users (PCWorld)

drag — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 21:40:45 +0000

Seems like everything is working the way it should be working.

Application developers develops OpenGL application, finds bug, reports bug, driver developers fix bug.

That's progress.

I am sure that it's dissapointing to everybody involved that the drivers are not better, but this is just the reality. As time goes on it gets better.

The key is really to:

1) Get application developers to stop using proprietary drivers
2) Get open source developers up to the point were application developers can reliably use them.

Firefox 4 Beta 9 Gives Short Shrift to Linux Users (PCWorld)

svena — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 20:33:07 +0000

Most of the issues found are already mentioned in the thread on the mailing list.

Oh, and a quick skim through bugzilla does confirm that Firefox devs are forwarding bug reports (and these bugs are being fixed).

Firefox 4 Beta 9 Gives Short Shrift to Linux Users (PCWorld)

arekm — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 20:14:46 +0000

Does anyone have a list of what these bugs actually are? (bugzilla links would be nice)

Firefox 4 Beta 9 Gives Short Shrift to Linux Users (PCWorld)

rahulsundaram — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 19:13:49 +0000

They were certainly doing that, filing bug reports and such. OSNews jumped the gun and other news sites picked up the story after that.

Firefox 4 Beta 9 Gives Short Shrift to Linux Users (PCWorld)

spot — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 19:04:32 +0000

If you want to work around this and enable it anyway, set this environment variable when you launch Firefox 4:

MOZ_GLX_IGNORE_BLACKLIST=true

(MOZ_WEBGL_FORCE_OPENGL=true may also be needed)

This "works for me" with Fedora 14 x86_64 on both Intel and ATI chipsets.

Firefox 4 Beta 9 Gives Short Shrift to Linux Users (PCWorld)

ernstp — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 18:57:29 +0000

They could have started working with Xorg developers on this before the original news was published though...
But as long as it leads to improvements for Linux in the end it's nice of course!
Running with WebGL enabled on Firefox nightly here, seems to work fine. Drivers from xorg-edgers ppa, kindof like installing (beta) drivers in Windows right?

Linux 3D drivers

rfunk — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 18:42:11 +0000

Sounds like they're running into what KDE4 developers ran into.

Firefox 4 Beta 9 Gives Short Shrift to Linux Users (PCWorld)

rahulsundaram — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 18:37:53 +0000

The content is reasonable but the title is nonsense. Firefox is doing the best possible approach here. They are doing what many others like GNOME Shell or KWin developers do. Work with Xorg folks on fixing the problems and helping themselves in the process.

http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/mesa-dev/2011-Janua...