[Mesa-dev] Chromium - Application-level nouveau blacklist

[Rob Clark]

On Sat, Jan 5, 2019 at 3:40 PM Ilia Mirkin <imirkin at alum.mit.edu> wrote:
>
> It looks like as of Chromium 71, nouveau is completely blacklisted.
>
> I don't really see a way back from this, since they don't cite any
> easily reproducible issues, except that some people had some issues
> with indeterminate hardware and indeterminate versions of mesa.
>
> In the bug that triggered this
> (https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=876523), where
> I might have slightly lost my cool, they (at the end) suggested that
> we try to make nouveau a first-class citizen with chromium. However I
> will never be able to present concrete evidence that inconcrete issues
> are resolved. I did run the WebGL CTS suite, but that resulted in some
> hangs from the the max-texture-size-equivalent test, and some
> browser-level weirdness after some tests where later tests all fail
> (due to what I have to assume is a browser bug). I don't think I
> managed to properly track down the true reason why. I didn't want to
> reach out to them with such results, as that's just further evidence
> of nouveau not working perfectly.
>
> In the meanwhile, end users are losing accelerated WebGL which in
> practice worked just fine (at least in my usage of it), and probably
> some other functionality.
>
> One idea is to flip GL_VENDOR to some random string if chromium is
> running. I don't like this idea, but I also don't have any great
> alternatives. We can also just take this, as yet-another nail in the
> nouveau coffin.
>

I think this would be a really bad idea

Better idea might be to request chromium to whitelist nouveau for
pairs of nv generation + mesa version that are known to pass (or at
least comes reasonably close to passing?) WebGL CTS.  Maybe setup a
wiki page or trello or bz or whatever w/ some pointers to info about
how to disable gpu blacklist (to run the cts tests in the first place)
and how to run cts, and table of nv generations.  I guess you don't
have hw or time to test everything yourself, but this is something
that distros and users can help with.  The idea for
wiki/trello/whatever was to help coordinate that and track open bugs
for failing CTS tests.


BR,
-R