Skia Update: New Branch M144

[Heather Miller]

Hi Skia Community! 

Skia has a new branch, M144. We will commit limited cherry picks of high priority issues to this branch for the next ~six weeks.**

**Next branch, due to the holiday production freeze, will be Monday, January 12, 2026.

Branch name: chrome/m144

Branched at fd5ad9dbfac6d647eabd8140fe83df6e7d06b541

(Includes changes through ~3 PM ET, Monday 12/1/25)

A list of public API changes is available in the RELEASE_NOTES.md file.

Enjoy!

[William Candillon]

Thank you for this. Would the team consider providing prebuilt binaries for Skia Graphite: https://github.com/google/skia/pull/215?

We upgraded to Ganesh version m144 very quickly as always.
For Graphite, we're getting a succession of somewhat obscure compilation errors while compiling Dawn. I would like to explore if there is a more cost-efficient way for us to do these upgrades. In the last Skia Graphite upgrade, we had invested substantial time in fixing another sequence of issues related to the Dawn build.

We had the exact same situations with standalone Dawn upgrades as well (some clients use WebGPU without Skia) and we fixed it with upstream prebuilt binaries: https://github.com/google/dawn/blob/main/.github/workflows/ci.yml. I can pick any commit on this repo and pull the binaries for iOS and Android.

I would like to do the same thing for Skia if there is openness to it. A compiling Skia does not guarantee a working Skia. In fact, in the case of Dawn, we were indeed generating bogus binaries at some point. But the nice thing is that it was actually someone from a completely different community than ours who spotted and fixed the issue, which is fun. And these issues are often trivial to solve compared to the current build issues we are facing.

Let me know if you have any thoughts on this.

Kind regards,

William

[matej...@gmail.com]

In case this helps anyone, the changes required to build dawn (as a part of Skia build) on iOS are quite small:

https://github.com/knopp/skia/commit/23f6e4c2d91899046176087c549e22ac08bb799d

This removes the arm64e slice from the build, the presence of which boggles my mind a bit since before iOS 26 the ABI wasn't even stable and you couldn't submit binaries with arm64e slices to AppStore (not entirely sure what the situation is after iOS 26, it might still get rejected).

But in case you insist of arm64e, you can modify buiild_dawn.py to set DCMAKE_OSX_ARCHITECTURES to arm64;arm64e in case of iOS/arm64.

Cheers,

Matt