Update on what happened in WebKit in the week from February 23 to March 2.
This installment of the periodical brings news about support for Qualcomm qtivdec2 and qtivenc2 on GStreamer, GPU texture atlas creation and replay substitution, enhancement of the scroll gesture in WPE, and two new releases: WebKitGTK 2.51.92 and WPE WebKit 2.51.92.
Cross-Port 🐱
Multimedia 🎥
GStreamer-based multimedia support for WebKit, including (but not limited to) playback, capture, WebAudio, WebCodecs, and WebRTC.
Work on adding support for the Qualcomm GStreamer qtivdec2 and qtivenc2 elements is on-going
Graphics 🖼️
Implemented GPU texture atlas creation and replay substitution in the Skia painting engine on GTK/WPE. After recording, raster images are packed into GPU atlases via BitmapTexture, with two upload paths: an optimized DMA-buf path that memory-maps GPU buffers and dispatches uploading to a dedicated worker thread, and a synchronous GL fallback using BitmapTexture::updateContents(). Atlas uploads are synchronized across workers using a countdown-latch fence. During replay, SkiaReplayCanvas intercepts raster image draws and substitutes them with atlas texture draws, mapping source coordinates into atlas space.
WPE WebKit 📟
WPE Platform API 🧩
New, modern platform API that supersedes usage of libwpe and WPE backends.
The recent WPE WebKit 2.51.92 release is the first one to have its WPEPlatform documentation online, but it was not included in the tarball. This issue has been corrected and tarballs for future releases will also include this documentation.
Scrolling using touch input with WPEPlatform would result in scrolling faster when more than one touch point was in effect. The gesture detector has been fixed to make scrolling have always a consistent speed.
Releases 📦️
The third —and likely the last— release candidates for the upcoming stable branch, WebKitGTK 2.51.92 and WPE WebKit 2.51.92, have been published. For those interested in previewing the upcoming 2.52.x series this release is expected to be quite stable; but there might be still some rough edges. Reporting issues in Bugzilla are, as usual, more than welcome.
That’s all for this week!
