Direct2D status leading up to Beta 5
Joe Drew
discuss the current status of Direct2D in mozilla-central, and its
status with respect to the release of Beta 5.
There are several bugs linked off the Direct2D beta tracker, bug 589289,
but there are several other issues that we know of we need to fix for
Direct2D. Luckily, most of them do not require much work in the short term.
* Bug 532106 - background shows through when switching tabs. This
seems to disproportionately affect people on Vista; perhaps
mainly with older graphics cards. We haven't nailed down
precisely what causes this, but luckily it goes away with the fix
to bug 130078, which we are hoping will be fixed for Beta 5.
* Bug 587508 - plugin invalidation issues. This doesn't affect all
plugins, and doesn't need to be fixed for beta 5. It might require
a relnote.
* Bug 551972 - Slow windowless plugins. This seems to have gotten
somewhat better since Bas landed SSE2 alpha recovery (bug 587936),
but we still need to fix it in a more robust way. Jeff is going to
work on this, probably post-beta 5.
* Bug 590328 - Redraw problems, mostly with old drivers. We have no
idea what the conditions are that cause this. Jeff is going to
land his video card information in about:support (bug 586046), and
then we are going to start collecting information from our users.
This is the most worrying, but we can't do anything without more
exposure to users. SUMO will also need to be ready to help people
disable Direct2D if they're having troubles, and collating the
information so we know what needs to be disabled/whitelisted. We
will need a section in the beta 5 release notes about Direct2D in
general, and Bas will be working with the Beta 5 release team to
work out what that section will look like.
* Startup Time (Ts and Txul, bugs 588451 and 587325) - Recent
changes have seemed to fix these. Crossing our fingers.
* Device lost problem - bug 553089. If the graphics driver crashes,
or it is upgraded from underneath us, or some other problems, we
crash. We can't fix this right now, because everything is going to
change after bug 130078. This will need a relnote. (This results
in crashes with the signature [@ _fill_rectangles ], in my
experience.)
* Add a pref to force off d2d - bug 590335. I will be adding a pref
to force D2D off in a way that doesn't require you to change a
random integer - it will be double-clicking on an about:config
pref instead.
* Fuzzy fonts - there are two problems here.
o Right now we do not obey the system preference of turning
ClearType off, bug 574976. There are some issues as to
whether we can make DirectWrite look the same as GDI in this
respect, but Bas will be looking into this. At the bare
minimum for Beta 5, we can turn off all font antialiasing if
ClearType is turned off.
o Some drivers make all text blurry - bug 590342. We think
that Microsoft has a fix to this in a hotfix that's linked
from the bug. We will need some evangelism to Microsoft here
if they do indeed have a fix that isn't being pushed out,
since Firefox with Direct2D will look terrible for users
affected by this issue.
* Determine what memory usage is acceptable (bug 590343) - While we
believe that the virtual/video memory leak users were plagued with
(bug 589809) is fixed, there is still some visible memory penalty
to using Direct2D, because we're loading all the usermode driver
code into our process, etc. We need to define what the acceptable
ranges of extra memory usage are here, and Bas will be doing that.
There is a lot of text up there, but the tl;dr is that we need a couple
of relnotes, a lot of investigation on the part of our users and SUMO
folk, and a couple of small code changes in order for Direct2D to be
ready for beta 5.
Joe
timeless
KWierso
> Please add to the list that it seems printscreen/screen captures doesn't work.
Is there a bug for steps to reproduce? I've been able to printscreen
successfully, and I've been running with D2D on for a while, now.
Mike Beltzner
> * Bug 587508 - plugin invalidation issues. This doesn't affect all
> plugins, and doesn't need to be fixed for beta 5. It might require
> a relnote.
Do we know which plugins it affects?
> * Bug 590328 - Redraw problems, mostly with old drivers. We have no
> idea what the conditions are that cause this. Jeff is going to
> land his video card information in about:support (bug 586046), and
> then we are going to start collecting information from our users.
If we get this in time we can run a test pilot study to get that information for all of our users, I think. That'd be pretty cool.
> * Add a pref to force off d2d - bug 590335. I will be adding a pref
> to force D2D off in a way that doesn't require you to change a
> random integer - it will be double-clicking on an about:config
> pref instead.
How is this different from https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=587857 which looks to create a user-visible preference?
cheers,
mike
Joe Drew
> On 2010-08-24, at 7:19 PM, Joe Drew wrote:
>
>> * Bug 587508 - plugin invalidation issues. This doesn't affect all
>> plugins, and doesn't need to be fixed for beta 5. It might require
>> a relnote.
> Do we know which plugins it affects?
Flash, but not all flash. Youtube, but not all youtube. A testcase would
sure make things easier on us!
> How is this different from
> https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=587857 which looks to
> create a user-visible preference?
This is not a user-visible preference. This is implementing the soft
underbelly of functionality which people can toggle in order to
test/debug; whether we have a user-visible preference (which would
simply utilize this functionality) is a separate issue.
Joe
Mike Beltzner
>>> * Bug 587508 - plugin invalidation issues. This doesn't affect all
>>> plugins, and doesn't need to be fixed for beta 5. It might require
>>> a relnote.
>> Do we know which plugins it affects?
>
> Flash, but not all flash. Youtube, but not all youtube. A testcase would sure make things easier on us!
That's an issue, a pretty big issue. How can we get you testcases?
>> How is this different from https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=587857 which looks to create a user-visible preference?
>
> This is not a user-visible preference. This is implementing the soft underbelly of functionality which people can toggle in order to test/debug; whether we have a user-visible preference (which would simply utilize this functionality) is a separate issue.
I think that the user-visible preference should be a blocker for beta 5. I don't want to make it any harder than it needs to be to turn this off if a user gets totally pooched by some incompatible driver we didn't blacklist.
cheers,
mike