Maksim Sisov Blog

It has been quite a long while since we wrote blogs about our Chromium Ozone/Wayland effort, and there are a lot of news right now. Igalia participated in the BlinkOn9 conference and gave a talk (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DREywLVAVeo) about the Ozone/Wayland support, and had many discussions on how to continue with upstreaming desktop integration related patches for the Mus service.

Even though, we had been able to make Chromium running with the Wayland backend natively, and upstreamed a lot of Ozone/Wayland related patches, some disagreements had had to be resolved before proceeding with upstreaming. To be precise, the future of the Mus service was unclear and it was decided to abandon it in favor of a platform desktop integration directly to Aura without Mus. Thanks for a good Ozone design, we had been able to quickly redesign our solution and upstream more patches to make it possible to run Chromium Ozone/Wayland from the ToT. Of course, it still has been missing some functionality patches, but the effort is going on steadily and we expect to have all the patches upstreamed in the following months. A lot of work still has to be done.

Another point I would like to mention is about our UI/GPU split effort. This is the effort to make Chromium Ozone/Wayland to be run with a separate gpu process. For that, a proper communication channel between the browser process, where a wayland connection is established, must be established. We have had tried a nested compositor approach, but decided to abandon it in favor of a dmabuf based approach, which will also allow us to have gpu native memory buffers, rasterization and, perhaps, zero-copy features enabled on some platforms. The idea behind of the dmabuf approach is to reuse some of the Ozone/Drm codebase, and by utilizing drm render nodes, create shared GBM buffers, which file descriptors are then shared with the browser process, where Wayland creates a dmabuf based wl_buffer and attaches it to wayland windows. At this stage, we have already had a working PoC, and Ozone/Drm refactorings are being upstreamed now. It will also support a presentation feedback if such protocol is available on a system with a Wayland compositor.

Last but not least, we would like to clarify about the accelerated media decode in Chromium Ozone/Wayland mentioned in https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Chromium-Igalia-Wayland-V4L2VDA.
To make it clear, we are not currently working on the V4L2, but rather the patches have been just merged by another external contributor for simplicity of compiling our Chromium solution on ARM based boards, especially Renesas M3 R-car board.