WebRender on Firefox

[mangofett]

So I saw this tweet: https://twitter.com/LukaszErecinsk1/stat...3589531650

I tried to enable WebRender on my Firefox but it seems to fail to start up. I could make it past the start up if I overrode OpenGL version to 3.3 but Firefox becomes a huge graphical mess, so not really any better. I'm on Wayland, default Manjaro install, mesa-git driver.

in aboutupport I see this:

unavailable by runtime: WebRender initialization failed
(#0) Error Failed GL context creation for WebRender: 0

Anyone get it successfully working? Is it worth pursuing for the performance increase?

[KC9UDX]

I got it working on Armbian simply by turning the option on in Firefox. Twice I've seen strange layout effects, but only momentarily. It's worked fine the rest of the time. But frankly I can't tell if it's faster or not.

[as400]

Plasma on Wayland, mesa-git, export PAN_MESA_DEBUG=gl3.

After enabling webrender firefox is all mess.

[poVoq]

Just updated my Manjaro, rebooted and enabled this (+restart of Firefox). I don't see any graphical issues. However no immediately obvious massive speed improvement either.

[as400]

It might not be enabled.
Take a look at "about:support". Decision log, Webrender lines especially.

[mangofett]

Yeah, it's worth noting that enabling webrender fails very silently. Here's an image of a failed aboutupport page on my end:



I also noticed Firefox is running on X even though I'm using Wayland. Force enabling Wayland allows me to start up WebRender to the 'mess' state without any GL overrides, so 'progress', I guess

[agD0i7rY]

I had understood that for this update, Webrender was only for Intel and AMD GPUs?

According to https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1653612
This is only valid for AMD and Intel and with the beta version of Firefox no?

[icecream95]

The rendering issues happen because some shaders fail register allocation, causing a vertex shader to emit garbage values. This is something that is fixable in Panfrost.


Although WebRender doesn't work yet, the OpenGL compositor can also make things a lot smoother. To enable it, go into about:config and set layers.acceleration.force-enabled to true.

[as400]

The rendering issues happen because some shaders fail register allocation, causing a vertex shader to emit garbage values. This is something that is fixable in Panfrost.


Although WebRender doesn't work yet, the OpenGL compositor can also make things a lot smoother. To enable it, go into about:config and set layers.acceleration.force-enabled to true.

It is fast with this setting. Thanks.

[mangofett]

The rendering issues happen because some shaders fail register allocation, causing a vertex shader to emit garbage values. This is something that is fixable in Panfrost.


Although WebRender doesn't work yet, the OpenGL compositor can also make things a lot smoother. To enable it, go into about:config and set layers.acceleration.force-enabled to true.

Good to have an expert chime in! Though I am surprised to hear it is fixable in Panfrost. Regardless, looking forward to it (one day)