[Mesa-dev] Mesa llvmpipe for WebGL software rendering

[Benoit Jacob]

----- Original Message -----
> On Mit, 2012-02-29 at 16:06 -0800, Benoit Jacob wrote:
> > 
> > ----- Original Message -----
> > > On Die, 2012-02-28 at 09:08 -0800, Benoit Jacob wrote:
> > > > 
> > > > At Mozilla we've been wondering if we could get a good software
> > > > fallback for users who can't get hardware-accelerated WebGL.
> > > > Mesa
> > > > llvmpipe seems like the best open source OpenGL renderer,
> > > > right? At
> > > > least, it performed superbly in our quick tests.
> > > 
> > > [...]
> > > 
> > > > 3. On GNU/Linux: why isn't Mesa llvmpipe installed by default
> > > > by
> > > > most
> > > > distros? Is there a real reason or is it just that nobody asked
> > > > for
> > > > it, or nobody saw a need for it? Trying to figure if llvmpipe
> > > > installed by default everywhere (on Linux) is something we can
> > > > realistically hope for.
> > > 
> > > One thing to keep in mind for this is that llvmpipe currently
> > > doesn't
> > > work on PowerPC architectures
> > 
> > PowerPC is not a big concern for us.
> > https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Supported_build_configurations
> > 
> > Besides x86 and x86-64, the other arch we care about is ARM (v7 and
> > soon v6 too).
> 
> E.g. Debian ships your browser on powerpc and many more
> architectures.

Well, each project does their own choice of which architectures to support; Debian is famous for its very wide architecture support, while Mozilla is currently focusing on only a few architectures.

Notice that WebGL renderers are only a drop in the bucket of what one has to do to support "the modern web" on a given architecture. For example, Mozilla is not currently supporting PPC in its JavaScript JIT compilers. If one wanted to support "the modern web" on PPC, supporting JavaScript JIT would be a much more important thing to do, before it would start making sense to focus on WebGL rendering.

Cheers,
Benoit