Question about SwiftShader on Chrome

[Fernando Carvalho]

I've just read, on the chromium blog, that on Chrome 18, we will find SwiftShader software rasterizer.

So I have some questions:

Is NaCl OpenGL taking advantage of that?

Is this technology available to Linux users?

Can users that run Linux with GPUs that don't have 3D acceleration, use 3D content?

Is the SwiftShader source code available on the Chromium repository?

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Fernando

[Nick Bray]

Is NaCl OpenGL taking advantage of that?

Any OpenGL call made in NaCl is sent to Chrome, and Chrome deals with the call as it sees fit.  If Chrome supports SwiftShader, NaCl will automatically use it.  Ultimately, SwiftShader is entirely transparent to NaCl and people working on GPU acceleration for Chrome are the ones who have the answers you want.  That being said, I walked over and asked them for you.

Is this technology available to Linux users?

No. 

Can users that run Linux with GPUs that don't have 3D acceleration, use 3D content?

No.

 

Is the SwiftShader source code available on the Chromium repository?

No.  Code that is licensed for is typically not available.  This is the case for the PDF viewer, for example.

[Rickard Eneqvist]

From when I was working on Chrome on ChromeOS for tablets I built and worked a lot with the 3D acceleration components (for WebGL) and at that time at least there was a build option to build against MESA as a OpenGL backend and the command pipeline is the same as for NaCl afaik.

 

My point is that there should be support for running NaCl 3D (as well as WebGL) on Linux machines lacking a dedicated GPU (but I assume its SwiftShader specifically that's interesting here).

 

/Rickard Eneqvist

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[John Bauman]

Yes, you can try --use-gl=osmesa on the command line if you don't have a gpu, but the performance will be terrible.

[Fernando Carvalho]

When I read that SwiftShader was bundled with Chrome 18, I thought that it would help users with poor GPUs even on Linux.

That would be great if we could see that.

Fernando