HTML 5 performance

[Jeremy Kahn]

The big question for Pine right now is how well Chromium will perform on the Raspberry Pi. Unfortunately I do not have hardware yet to test Chromium on, does anyone have an RPi with Chromium set up to do some performance testing?

According to this article it's kinda slow: http://myraspberrypiexperience.blogspot.co.uk/p/chromium-browser.html

Does anybody out there with deep Linux knowledge know how we might be able to optimize performance or allocate resources for HTML 5 games?

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Jeremy Kahn

jerem...@gmail.com
Tel: 847.347.8086

[Luke Stebner]

I'm not sure this is the right place to post this, but do we need to consider any pre-installed drivers for USB devices such as different keyboards, mice or even gamepads (if possible to use with HTML5)?

[Jeremy Kahn]

Yeah, that will definitely be a challenge.  We're almost certainly going to have to roll a custom Linux distro, which means custom (or at least hard-picked) drivers and basically custom everything.  This well be especially challenging because I have no experience in this whatsoever. :)

It would be great if we could fully support the HTML 5 Gamepad API.

On Thu, Jul 19, 2012 at 10:41 PM, Luke Stebner <luke.s...@gmail.com> wrote:

I'm not sure this is the right place to post this, but do we need to consider any pre-installed drivers for USB devices such as different keyboards, mice or even gamepads (if possible to use with HTML5)?

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[Alex Wilson]

I've been reading some stuff on the LFS website and I definitely think making a custom Linux is the way to go especially because it preserves space. I use am Ubuntu machine as my main computer so I have experience with Linux, but I've never build my own.

[Jeremy Kahn]

The thing that concerns me with LFS is that it targets x86 chips.  Even if it can be made to work with ARM, I worry that by using LFS with no low-level Linux knowledge may be a very slow way to go.  We'll certainly need something very optimized, and a from-scratch distro would be best, but I want to at least get something workable in our lifetimes.  I'm going to look at Arch Linux, because it seems to be lighter than RPi Debian.

On Sat, Jul 21, 2012 at 1:30 PM, Alex Wilson <arex...@gmail.com> wrote:

I've been reading some stuff on the LFS website and I definitely think making a custom Linux is the way to go especially because it preserves space. I use am Ubuntu machine as my main computer so I have experience with Linux, but I've never build my own.

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[Jeremy Kahn]

I found this.  It's a guide for building a minimal Linux install with Chromium for RPi, which is exactly what we want.  It will take me some time to try this out (lots of downloads + building things are slowing me down), but I will report back once I have something.

[Jeremy Kahn]

It looks like Chrome can be made to run reasonably well on the RPi.  I haven't tested this, but there are smart people working on this - we're not alone.

[Jeremy Kahn]

So I've gotten Chromium to run on emulated hardware (I followed this guide).  I can successfully run this simple Rekapi demo. The performance isn't wonderful - I get maybe 10 frames a second.  But I'm still really optimistic about this, as we at least have basic functionality.

Something to keep in mind - the Raspberry Pi simply is not capable of cutting edge performance.  But with enough optimization in both the platform and the games that run on it, I think we can make a workable platform for SNES-quality gaming.

[Luke Stebner]

It sounds like we are going to need to put together a small game (or maybe a few) to do some benchmark testing with. 

[Jeremy Kahn]

Definitely. I want to focus on building a stable platform right now, but I'm happy to chip in to make a demo game when the platform is in better shape. 

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Jeremy Kahn

jerem...@gmail.com

Tel:  847.347.8086

Sent via mobile. 

[Luke Stebner]

If the Raspberry Pi ends up not being able to run games well or makes building games just far too much optimization work on the developer, are we going to look into other platforms or is your focus on only getting this running on the Raspberry Pi?

[Jeremy Kahn]

I'm not married to RPi. I'd really like to make it work for us, and right now I am far from giving up on it, but ultimately I will make technology choices that best let us achieve our goal: A low-cost HTML 5 game console. At the moment the RPi looks like our best bet. 

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Jeremy Kahn

jerem...@gmail.com

Tel:  847.347.8086

Sent via mobile. 

[Luke Stebner]

Cool. Just wondering what you're plan was, glad you're open to another device if need be. Not ready to give up yet either, especially not before we have an actual device and try running code on it. 

[Jeremy Kahn]

Apparently Hexxeh has gotten Chromium to run pretty well on the RPi hardware, and I've pinged him to ask how he does his magic.  Hopefully I can learn from him to make a performant frontend for Pine.

[Luke Stebner]

I was just talking to my coworker Chris (who is a web & game programmer) and he was giving me some alternative ideas like creating our own Python process/UI that could serve HTML instead of using something like Chromium. In fact, this could really be written in any language (C, C++, Java, etc). Just something else to throw out there.

[Luke Stebner]

Again, just to put other options out there for reference: The Gooseberry

[Jeremy Kahn]

I think it's really worth it to try and make Chromium work for us.  In addition to Webkit and V8, it provides a ton of developer tools, which we want to pass on to our users.  Also, it's constantly updated by Google, which is significant.

Then again, if the psuedo-webview that Chris is describing is more efficient due to lack of Chromium bloat, we should definitely consider it.  We'll go with whatever is best for Pine game developers.

The Gooseberry looks interesting.  The more powerful hardware looks compelling, and we can definitely give it a shot if the RPi can't be made to work.  I should mention that one of the reasons that I want Pine to work for the RPi is the community behind it.  The RPi community is large and rabid, and that would do a lot to help this project gain momentum.  But again, time will tell what truly is the best option.

On Thu, Jul 26, 2012 at 1:51 PM, Luke Stebner <luke.s...@gmail.com> wrote:

Again, just to put other options out there for reference: The Gooseberry

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[Luke Stebner]

All good points! I'm all for the RPi and your reasoning of sticking with it.

[Jeremy Kahn]

I'm working on benchmarks for Pine.  I just pushed an idle performance benchmark.  I built out a tiny framerate monitor yesterday and hooked it up a UI - which does nothing.  This will give us a good baseline for Pine performance.  On my MacBook AIr, I get just under 60 fps, which is expected.  The next step is to see how this performs on the actual hardware.

I would love it of someone could run the idle benchmark and report back the framerate.  To try it, just pull the latest code from Github and navigate to pine/ui/benchmark/?benchmark=idle.

We don't yet boot into the Pine UI... I should work on that.  I will need to coordinate with Scott on how to do that later, right now he is working out some MongoDB issues.

[Jeremy Kahn]

For what it's worth, my QEMU Raspbian environment gets about 49 fps at idle.  I don't think this value is indicative of much, because the environment is emulated and therefore quite slow.

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[Jeremy Kahn]

Ugh.  Apparently, Chrome limits the JavaScript performance of iframes quite a bit.  I just pushed a new benchmark - it allows you to add or remove rotating squares to a page to see how the framerate fluctuates (hit space and backspace).  You can check it out by navigating to ui/benchmark/?benchmark=rotating-divs, or just selecting "Squares - JS" from the Pine UI.

When navigating to the page directly on my MacBook Air, I can add about 115 squares before the framerate dips below 50.  When running the same benchmark in the Pine sandbox (an iframe), I can only add about 7 squares before dipping below 50 fps.  This is definitely going to affect our sandboxing strategy - running games in an iframe isn't going to work.

I think we need to work out a solution for running games in their own tab.  I'm not sure how to really do this yet, I need to explore it a bit.  We'll need some way of programmatically controlling Chromium's tabs, and there should be a few ways to do that.  What I need to find out first is if we can actually have multiple tabs in Kiosk Mode.

[Jeremy Kahn]

Quick followup:  Chromium supports multiple tabs in Kiosk Mode, but actually controlling them programmatically might be a bit tricky.

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