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Comment by bubblethink | Hacker News Reader

This sucks. Chromium doesn't do accelerated video decode for intel on linux either. And now this. What's the AMD scene like ?

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The amdgpu drivers in Linux are fantastic these days. Works out of the box with most hardware. No proprietary binaries needed, other than the firmware blobs. AMD is doing a really solid job of supporting their Linux user base.

AMD drivers have an OS-independent hardware abstraction library at the core and they "only" have to adapt it to different systems: https://github.com/GPUOpen-Drivers/pal

So does nVidia.

Except the AMD driver is 1) open source and 2) works.

Exactly my point. The fact that nVidia also has an OS-independent abstraction library shouldn't stop them from making it work, at least.

No multi-GPU support (at least 2 years ago, using the binary drivers), no AMF support on Linux, and couldn't get multi-display support on a split screen. AMD is fail for me...

Yes, but does chromium play nice for acceleration ?

For rendering yes. For video decoding no. Chromium needs a patch to use VA-API[1].

[1]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Chromium#Hardware_video...

Seems to be. From about:gpu:

    Graphics Feature Status
    Canvas: Hardware accelerated
    Flash: Hardware accelerated
    Flash Stage3D: Hardware accelerated
    Flash Stage3D Baseline profile: Hardware accelerated
    Compositing: Hardware accelerated
    Multiple Raster Threads: Enabled
    Native GpuMemoryBuffers: Software only. Hardware acceleration disabled
    Out-of-process Rasterization: Disabled
    Hardware Protected Video Decode: Hardware accelerated
    Rasterization: Software only. Hardware acceleration disabled
    Skia Deferred Display List: Disabled
    Skia Renderer: Disabled
    Surface Control: Disabled
    Surface Synchronization: Enabled
    Video Decode: Hardware accelerated
    Viz Service Display Compositor: Disabled
    WebGL: Hardware accelerated
    WebGL2: Hardware accelerated

Which laptops have AMD chips? I've looked casually, but only seen Nvidia.

Nvidia also does an excellent job of supporting linux. It's just not open source.

Excellent is a stretch. It works for things they support. Look at optimus and wayland for instance. Also, they restrict nouveau from working by signing blobs and enforcing checks. And this is years after Linus flipping the bird and other repeated requests.

Optimus was the single most pain in the ass thing I have ever experienced in linux. Never again, am I going to run linux on an optimus machine with Bumblebee.

Never again am I going to buy an Optimus machine.

EDIT: Wait, there's an open source thing? Is Bumblebee any good? Optimus is such a pain in my ass that it's making me want to smash this laptop.

They became famous on the net with this bug: https://github.com/MrMEEE/bumblebee-Old-and-abbandoned/issue...

I don't know, I upgraded to 18.10 and my XPS's brightness control doesn't work. The Prime switchy thing can't change cards without a reboot, and if the screen goes to sleep between switching cards and rebooting, it never comes up again. Actually, with 18.10, it never comes up again anyway. I have a whole host of issues with nVidia cards, my next card is going to be AMD.

18.10 isn't even supported by Dell.

That's not the point. The switching issue at least is present on 18.04 as well. Basically, ubuntu changed the mechnanism from bbswitch in 16.04 to a different one in 18.04. The 18.04 one is buggy and inferior at the moment.

Yeah, I spent an hour trying to get Bumblebee to work, to no avail. Alas.

Awesome, a laptop with one-year OS support...

Dell doesn't support non LTS (long term support) releases. The next LTS release of Ubuntu is 20.04.

What does this mean? What sort of support did I get from Dell for 18.04? I had to download and install everything myself.

It's not even an LTS release.

Try Arch with the 4.20 kernel.

I might get angry enough to switch to Arch at some point, but I have too many Ubuntu-specific preferences and scripts to easily switch...

Their driver is really behind in terms of supporting newer libdrm features. It's also not well integrated in the ecosystem. They basically don't talk to the other Linux graphics devs.

Well, there is that whole GBM/EGLstreams thing with Wayland. Also their supported architectures list is basically x86 these days.

Chromium seems to do accelerated video decode with Intel GPU on Linux for me:

Graphics Feature Status

Canvas: Hardware accelerated

Flash: Hardware accelerated

Flash Stage3D: Hardware accelerated

Flash Stage3D Baseline profile: Hardware accelerated

Compositing: Hardware accelerated

Multiple Raster Threads: Enabled

Native GpuMemoryBuffers: Software only. Hardware acceleration disabled

Out-of-process Rasterization: Disabled

Hardware Protected Video Decode: Hardware accelerated

Rasterization: Hardware accelerated

Skia Deferred Display List: Disabled

Skia Renderer: Disabled

Surface Control: Disabled

Surface Synchronization: Enabled

Video Decode: Hardware accelerated

Viz Service Display Compositor: Disabled

WebGL: Hardware accelerated

WebGL2: Hardware accelerated

You can get native GPU buffers via enabling zero copy rasterizer in flags and passing --enable-native-gpu-memory-buffers via chromium-flags or as an argument.

They work on ChromeOS the same way they do on desktop Linux and I've been using them for months without issue.

I have Chrome Version 65.0.3325.162 (Official Build) (64-bit) on 4.19.13-300.fc29.x86_64 with i915 graphics

00:02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation Skylake GT2 [HD Graphics 520] [8086:1916] (rev 07) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])

And chrome://gpu says Video Decode: Unavailable

And it points to this bug: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=137247

You need a VAAPI build of Chromium, it isn't on by default.

Arch has a PKGBUILD in the repo: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/chromium-vaapi/ and I think there are builds for most popular distros out there nowadays.

If you are on Arch or one of its family you can get a -bin version in the AUR or use ArchlinuxCN that builds it in their repo.

The Chromium in Fedora's standard repo is built with it, and when I run it chrome://gpu does say video hardware acceleration is enabled. But at least with a handful of youtube videos, it doesn't matter, still uses 200%+ CPU, same as Chrome (no acceleration), laptop still gets hot and fans still run.

Are you on wayland ? That only works for X. See the comments section of https://fedoramagazine.org/chromium-on-fedora-finally-gets-v...

I haven't been following that bug, but a couple of things. Did you ignore-blacklists ? If you do ignore-blacklists, it overrides some stuff, but not everything. Also, the about:gpu page is not entirely accurate (particularly after ignore-blacklists) from what I remember. I think you should play a video and go to chrome://media-internals to figure out which path it is using. There have also been patches to enable acceleration for intel, but not merged upstream. So if you got a patched version, or your distro did that for you, it could also work. Finally, it works on chromeOS, which also uses Intel hardware, but that's because google supports chromeOS.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/chromium#Hardware_video...

You can get hardware video on Intel and AMD.

Only decode, there is no va-api support for AMF, say to get hardware HEVC encoding.

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