[Intel-gfx] Status of WebGL with open-source intel drivers

[Robert Kaiser]

Clemens Eisserer schrieb:
> Whats the current state of WebGL on various browsers with the
> open-source intel driver?
> I have a  i945GM based machine running Fedora-14, and no matter which
> browser I try (FireFox4,  Chrome, Opera) - all tell me WebGL has been
> disabled.
> Even disabling sanity checks in FireFox that prevent it from enabling
> WebGL whith intel drivers didn't help.
>
> Are there any plans to support the missing OpenGL features that
> prevent browsers from enabling webgl on my system?

I can't speak for the others, but as I'm working for a "browser 
manufacturer" and I have followed WebGL somewhat around here, what I can 
say is that Mozilla has only enabled WebGL on Linux for relatively 
current versions of the binary NVidia driver in Firefox 4. This is 
because there were some instabilities in Mesa and other drivers with our 
WebGL code and we wanted to get something shipped for once.

There is some environment variable that can be set to enable it despite, 
but there's a better way if you want to test in a way that hopefully can 
help both the Intel driver team and our team: try "Nightly" builds 
(currently the code on the way to Firefox 6, which is to be released in 
August). There we enable WebGL for all drivers that are new enough and 
not explicitely blacklisted (and do not crash when instantiating a GLX 
context), which makes the Intel drivers be enabled as well.

I have a 945GM-based laptop where those builds work to enable WebGL, but 
something either in how our code works or how the driver works does make 
that very inefficient, so that I only get one frame rendered every 
roughly 2 seconds. Would be interesting to have experts on both sides 
work together to find out how to improve on that.

Unfortunately, I can't test on a newer Intel chipset as my SandBridge 
system only works with vesafb and nobody seems to be willing to even 
look into https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=37010 so I'm 
starting to think if I should kick out Intel from my board and graphics 
setup again. Sorry for the somewhat offtopic rant, but I'm getting 
somewhat frustrated - esp. as I'd expect that WebGL could work decently 
there if I could just use a proper driver.

Robert Kaiser