[ozone-dev] Announcing Chromium ozone-gbm for Linux project

[Joone Hur]

Hi,

Intel’s Open Source Technology Center has been working on getting Ozone-GBM
to run on desktop Linux so that Chromium can run directly with DRM/GBM
without X11 or Wayland. Here is an article about the project:

https://01.org/chromium/blogs/tiagovignatti/2014/chromium-ozone-gbm-explained

There have been some updates on the project since that blog post. First, we
have enabled some of GPU acceleration features provided by Intel Graphics
such as zero-copy texture upload and video decoding. Second, a Yocto recipe
(currently tested against Yocto’s “pyro” stable branch) is provided so that
anyone can easily build their own Linux image with Chromium Ozone-GBM (and
the accompanying changes to Mesa and the Linux kernel).

These optimizations (including zero-copy texture upload, video/image
decoding, and hardware overlays) have been available on Intel-based
Chromebooks, and this blog post
<https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/zero-copy-texture-uploads-in-chrome-os>
describes them in more detail. By enabling them on regular desktop Linux,
we can get similar performance improvements: 4K 60FPS video playback on 7th
generation (Kaby Lake) Intel processors and H.264 2K smooth video playback
on Atom (Cherry Trail) processors. Here is a video that shows the
performance comparison:

This project is experimental because the browser runs as a Mash client and
keyboard input is not currently working so we’re looking into the problem.
I’m sharing the Yocto recipe, patches and build instructions for Chromum58
at https://github.com/joone/meta-crosswalk so that you can easily test
ozone-gbm in Linux.

In order to make Ozone-GBM run on OS_LINUX and OS_CHROMEOS targets
together, ozone_platform_gbm should be supported for OS_LINUX. Display
Configurator also needs to be included and libdrm & minigbm should be built
with Intel driver. If Google is okay with this change, I will work on this.

Any comments or suggestions are welcome.

Thanks,

Joone