Announcing Chromium ozone-gbm for Linux project

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Joone Hur

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Oct 17, 2017, 2:39:53 PM10/17/17

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Hi,

Intel’s Open Source Technology Center has been working on getting Ozone-GBM to run on desktop Linux so that Chromium can run directly with DRM/GBM without X11 or Wayland. Here is an article about the project:

https://01.org/chromium/blogs/tiagovignatti/2014/chromium-ozone-gbm-explained

There have been some updates on the project since that blog post. First, we have enabled some of GPU acceleration features provided by Intel Graphics such as zero-copy texture upload and video decoding. Second, a Yocto recipe (currently tested against Yocto’s “pyro” stable branch) is provided so that anyone can easily build their own Linux image with Chromium Ozone-GBM (and the accompanying changes to Mesa and the Linux kernel).

These optimizations (including zero-copy texture upload, video/image decoding, and hardware overlays) have been available on Intel-based Chromebooks, and this blog post describes them in more detail. By enabling them on regular desktop Linux, we can get similar performance improvements: 4K 60FPS video playback on 7th generation (Kaby Lake) Intel processors and H.264 2K smooth video playback on Atom (Cherry Trail) processors. Here is a video that shows the performance comparison:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CY7X6vWD_wo

This project is experimental because the browser runs as a Mash client and keyboard input is not currently working so we’re looking into the problem. I’m sharing the Yocto recipe, patches and build instructions for Chromum58 at https://github.com/joone/meta-crosswalk so that you can easily test ozone-gbm in Linux.

In order to make Ozone-GBM run on OS_LINUX and OS_CHROMEOS targets together, ozone_platform_gbm should be supported for OS_LINUX. Display Configurator also needs to be included and libdrm & minigbm should be built with Intel driver. If Google is okay with this change, I will work on this.