Switching the Linux graphics stack from GLX to EGL

Hi there! This is a guest post from Robert Mader, who contributed enormous improvements to Firefox's graphics stack on Linux. TL;DR In the upcoming Firefox 94 release we will enable the EGL backend for a big group of our Linux users. This will increase WebGL performance, reduce resource consumption and make our life as developers …

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Improving texture atlas allocation in WebRender

This is going to be a rather technical dive into a recent improvement that went into WebRender. Texture atlas allocation In order to submit work to the GPU efficiently, WebRender groups as many drawing primitives as it can into what we call batches. A batch is submitted to the GPU as a single drawing command …

moz://gfx newsletter #53

Bonjour à tous et à toutes, this is episode 53 of your favorite and only Firefox graphics newsletter. From now on instead of peeling through commit logs, I will be simply gathering notes sent to me by the rest of the team. This means the newsletter will be shorter, hopefully a bit less overwhelming with …

moz://gfx newsletter #52

Hello everyone! I know you have been missing your favorite and only newsletter about software engineers staying at home, washing their hands often and fixing strange rendering glitches in Firefox's graphics engine. In the last two months there has been a heap of fixes and improvements. Before the usual change list I'll go through a …

moz://gfx newsletter #51

Bonjour, bonjour! Another long overdue episode of your favourite Mozilla gfx team newsletter is here. A few weeks ago, Jessie published a call to help us find steps to reproduce a mysterious glitch. Thanks a ton to everyone who helped out with this one! Glenn landed a fix to an issue that we suspect might …

moz://gfx newsletter #50

Hi there! Another gfx newsletter incoming. Glenn and Sotaro's work on integrating WebRender with DirectComposition on Windows is close to being ready. We hope to let it ride the trains for Firefox 75. This will lead to lower GPU usage and energy consumption. Once this is done we plan to follow up with enabling WebRender …

moz://gfx newsletter #49

By way of introduction, I invite you to read Markus' excellent post on this blog about CoreAnimation integration yielding substantial improvements in power usage if you haven't already. Next steps in this OS compositor integration saga include taking advantage CoreAnimation with WebRender's picture caching infrastructure (rendering tiles directly into CoreAnimation surfaces), as well as rendering …

moz://gfx newsletter #48

Greetings! This issue of the newsletter is long overdue. Without further ado: What's new in gfx Wayland dmabuf textures Martin Stransky landed the dmabuf texture work which was at the prototype stage at the time of the previous newsletter. This is only used with the GL compositor at the moment which is not enabled by …

moz://gfx newsletter #47

Hi there! Time for another mozilla graphics newsletter. In the comments section of the previous newsletter, Michael asked about the relation between WebRender and WebGL, I'll try give a short answer here. Both WebRender and WebGL need access to the GPU to do their work. At the moment both of them use the OpenGL API, …

moz://gfx newsletter #46

Hi there! As previously announced WebRender has made it to the stable channel and a couple of million users are now using it without having opted into it manually. With this important milestone behind us, now is a good time to widen the scope of the newsletter and give credit to other projects being worked …