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Google Won't Enable Chrome Video Acceleration Because of Linux GPU Bugs
An anonymous reader writes "Citing 'code we consider to be permanently "experimental" or "beta,"' Google Chrome engineers have no plans on enabling video acceleration in the Chrome/Chromium web browser. Code has been written but is permanently disabled by default because 'supporting GPU features on Linux is a nightmare' due to the reported sub-par quality of Linux GPU drivers and many different Linux distributions. Even coming up with a Linux GPU video acceleration white-list has been shot down over fear of the Linux video acceleration code causing stability issues and problems for Chrome developers. What have been your recent experiences with Linux GPU drivers?"
You mean like Google Maps??
ChromeOS, GPU acceleration always! Same hardware and drivers but not horribly tied to the Google Cloud? Nope.
It's normal to has custom configurations between Windows, OS X and Linux, so why are they hurting the performance of "the many" over the weakness of the few?
They already have custom support for OS-specific features (e.g., OS X's full screen mode), so this would not be a new development.
Using intel i3 graphics with default driver that comes with RHEL6/CentOS6. I startup chromium with --ignore-gpu-blacklist. It has been more than a year now and so far so good.
Not Android Linux, or Windows or OS X?
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
I remember these types of problems in the early days of Linux, only then it was audio drivers. Getting audio to work was a disaster. Video typically worked ok but that was before nVidia and AMD were the major players. Now the tides have turned and audio works like a dream and video is what sucks ass.
I swear I've had more issues with video this last year than I did in the last 15 combined.
Considering google will try to run against the GPL drivers, I seen similar experiences where I agree w/Google.
Google Maps or Bing Maps show black on satellite views, google earth constantly crashes randomly. Video playback of hi res content like 1080p/60 in fullscreen mode sucks. Video scaling--ha., and generic redraw glitches make me have a dedicated OSX box (MBP from 2008!) for multimedia in general use.
The proprietary drivers are only marginally better. And still have most of the same problems.
Is this really something that's best fixed by expecting Nvidia/ATI/Intel to release higher quality drivers for every distro? Or is this a distro problem, where LInux will simply never have ability to handle acceleration very well because it's a constantly-moving target?
It's an honest question. I'm curious to see what people involved with either Linux or GPU drivers thinks.
It depends on what GPU drivers you're talking about. Nouveau's GPU drivers suck ass. That's not even a question. And Nvidia's aren't that much better. This goes all the way down past the DRM and into X itself. Whether you're talking about incomprehensible error messages, random crashes, GTK/Qt conflicts and glitches, the amazing way Linux window managers offload critical system functionality into graphical icon packages called themes for the sake of customizability. And you have to deal with all of this before you can even get to a usable desktop environment.
Really, Google needs to hook up with Nvidia and AMD if they want to get anything done on the GPU front as long as those two keep refusing to open source their driver stack.
Not too concerned about this. It's not like the entire feature of video playback is being disabled; it's just a power efficiency issue. I'm sure there would be a lot more upset users if it were enabled by default and crashing peoples' browsers (or the entire OS), vs. having it disabled by default and video playing back correctly at a greater cost to battery life on laptops.
That said, Windows drivers aren't much better off; there are well-documented problems with the hardware acceleration used by Chrome on Windows with the AMD Catalyst drivers; the problems have existed for a year or more and have not been addressed, yet hardware acceleration of canvas, etc. continues to be enabled by default on this hardware.
Seems like a bit of a double standard, but as long as the code to enable the experimental feature is shipped with the browser, savvy users who know that their driver does it right can enable it for a power savings. Even users who aren't sure whether or not their drivers will do it correctly can enable it temporarily, try it out, and see if they experience any crashes; if so, disable it or try to get a newer driver (especially if they're using the open source graphics stack).
Also, as long as you're running a recent version of the open source graphics stack, you are rather more likely to hit problems with this kind of functionality in the proprietary drivers -- especially Catalyst on Linux, which is a heaping load of crap -- than in the open source stack. The trick is to get your open source graphics stack components (kernel, Xorg server, Xorg client libs, DDX, Mesa, LLVM, and supporting libs) version-aligned so they all work harmoniously together, and then don't use absurdly new hardware whose hardware support implementation is still a work in progress. If you can satisfy those two simple criteria, the open source graphics stack should run quite well.
I must admit, I don't do gaming on my Linux rig, but ... aren't there major 3D games being published for Linux via Humble Bundles, Steam, GoG, and no doubt others as well? Is this a support nightmare for those companies? And if not, how is it that they can work with GPUs in Linux, but the living gods of code over at Google can't hack it? I'm at work and can't be bothered to look up compelling examples, but I'm pretty sure The Witcher 2 runs on Linux, and that's a pretty GPU-intensive title. When something like this doesn't add up, it usually means I'm missing something. Like maybe Witcher 2 requires a specific distro that uses proprietary drivers or something, but Google's talking about Linux in general? Can anyone clue me in?
Linux on the desktop is still years behind its competition. Video drivers and the struggle to install one (ATI for example) makes it difficult to adopt it for any "normal" user. Few distros work out of the box and even those have issue in other parts like usability (Thank you Unity!).
But it's not only video, it's also sound that keeps Linux behind. For example in Skype you have multiple sound devices to choose from but only 1 works. Pulsaudio server tries to fix that but still I cannot explain why on Windows in a virtual machine (Linux as host) the sound is better than in Linux itself.
Linux is great on servers and for networking but for the desktop it is clearly years behind everything from the 21st century. Good thing that others (manufacturers using Android) managed to create something at least more usable.
(Still) A Linux user.
If you want GPU acceleration that actually works somewhat as expected in LINUX, you need a relatively recent (but not TOO recent) graphics accelerator card and a popular distro such as Ubuntu / Linux Mint so that you have access to precompiled proprietary drivers (and an automated installer) that have actually been tested with that distribution (and still may break things when you install them even after they have passed testing). Mileage will vary on other distros but you will likely need the most recent release of the OS in order to get acceleration working without tons of effort. You will still need to use a proprietary driver if you intend to do anything more advanced than rendering 2d effects, and the desktop environment may impact performance if gl effects are enabled.
If you manage to avoid breaking Xorg after you have installed the proprietary drivers, you will still find that performance is lagging behind equivalent setups in Windows, and rendering issues may appear in certain games that will not be resolved for at least one or more driver releases, typically not included with that particular distribution's release. This will force you to either upgrade to the alpha/beta/testing version of that distro or else try to compile your own proprietary drivers, either scenario including a significant amount of additional risk to your environment and potentially costing hours of effort to resolve.
God help you if you have a laptop with a hybrid intel/nVidia GPU system that is designed to use the intel GPU for common 2D tasks and the nVidia GPU for gaming or other high performance 3d rendering tasks in an effort to offer the best of both worlds (good battery life and high performance) which is an absolutely nightmare to get working correctly in LINUX.
God help you if you are dealing with EFI or UEFI.
These are some of the reasons why I bought a used Mac and stopped using LINUX as my primary OS.
Do you see substantial performance improvement with this?
Simply enable it for NVIDIA users by default. It works the same across every distribution, and in fact, every OS. Google are just as cowardly as Adobe were.
For those who want faster flash and faster Chrome, try this:
* Go to chrome://flags
* Override software rendering list -> Enable
Welcome to a faster Flash and faster Chrome :)
Oh, if only a large company like, say, Google would adopt the drivers and support their development...
My first program:
Hell Segmentation fault
I think that it is to drive licensed content on chrome to flash and then break flash for Linux as they know that Linux will reverse engineer chrome to view and possible grab single use content from the Linux side for pay per view or online TV, movies. So the solution is to force to an ecosystem that controls licensed content better and that won't be open source Linux, just chrome on windows and mac
I love how you claim AMD video chipsets suck but somehow put intel in the praise side... intel gpu's are garbage by any reasonable standard AMD cards often boast the best performance.
The fact that linux drivers suck for all 3 (and they do) is sad supporting gpu accelleration should be easy in a market where only 3 product lines tend to exist at a time
given that CPU horsepower today is good enough, and tomorrow will be more so. Besudes how much video power do you need for your typical low-rez linux display. Not much. Better to be safe and cozy than to fall off into some windows netherworld of black and blue screens of death.
Google's clearly passed its prime. Three years ago, I wouldn't be surprised if they just said "screw it, let's write some drivers and show these guys how it's done!" I mean they did the same thing with Dart, WebP, SPDY, and other things... they didn't even care what others thought, they just created their own replacement web stack. But drivers? God forbid. Leave that kind of rat's nest to Mozilla.
so there fucking everywhere
Really?
It's been down hill since then.
they'd remove the blacklist completely --- and all the driver vendors would quickly fix the bugs (if there even are any).
As it is, no-one fixes the drivers because there aren't that many test cases showing the hypothetical bugs. And a good way to get those test cases would be with a frequently used app like Chromium.
By keeping the blacklist, it means those bugs they think are there will likely never be found and fixed.
In 2 words: THEY SUCK.
I had to abort a windows to linux port because the intel linux graphics driver is BROKEN (Intel Atom N455). I spent weeks convincing a customer he was better off moving his code base to linux, and when I finally got the OK to build a prototype, the UI was unusable. I really wish the GPU manufacturers would provide enough documentation so the Open source ppl could come in and fix it.
I'm guessing this has more to do with Google's interest in promoting ChromeOS. They will keep support for vanilla Linux at a minimum until ChromeOS gets a more solid footing. Only when vanilla Linux is no longer a threat to ChromeOS will Google acquiesce in order to keep up its facade of supporting open source.
I've been running Centos 6 with a Gefore GTX 285 without any issues. Running with the nvidia proprietary drivers, no problems. Didn't take long to setup.
This setup has been running for about a year now with no issues. Heck I even play some games (Minecraft & starmade) on it.
Only irritation is I needed to make an init script that would auto update the driver and reboot if my kernel updated...
I've been using Linux as my primary OS for 10 years. My desktop PC does dual boot into windows for a few games but spends 95% of the time in Linux. I've done a bit of gaming and other graphics intensive applications under Linux without any problems. As a part time gaming machine, there is a mid range NVIDIA card hiding inside and I've always used the proprietary NVIDIA drivers which are as good as those on windows. There was a time when installing those drivers was a bit of a pain, due to other developers trying to to force their extremist political views on users, but it is a very simple process now.
Some drivers might have problems but there is no reason they couldn't take the same approach as Firefox developers: provide a user controlled, easily accessible, option to enable hardware acceleration... Maybe that last point shows why I don't care what Google does with Chrome on Linux or any other platform... Firefox works for me on Linux, Windows and Android.
Not having flash in chromium was one of the many straws. This doesn't help.
I used to use a Chrome/Firefox combo to segregate my browsing/cookies. Just switched to multiple firefox profiles and added a "Close Tabs to the Right" plugin (to restore the one thing I missed about chrome). Much happier and I doubt I'll ever go back.
It's obvious that the google gui programmers just use windows or mac gui APIs and don't know how to code. Linux GPU code has been extremely stable. Maybe they can learn how to program from the folks at Steam ? LMAO The new Steam Appliance runs Linux. I use a GTX 560 in a MacPro 2,1 running linux on bare metal with NO ISSUES.
linux drivers suck for all 3
Don't tell Valve! You'll ruin there latest business model!
Seriously, I've used GPUs from all three manufacturers and found every Intel and nvidia hardware/driver combination I've tried to work well in Linux, and every AMD combination to be the opposite. I wish it were not so, but it is, in my experience.
I am literally 3000 tokens away from the chaotic crossbow --Stephen
I never had any issues with the open-source drivers.
Intel's driver is really good, as is radeon. The performance and feature-set of radeon isn't at the level of fglrx but it works out of the box.
With fglrx you lose modesetting, get random freezes and other bugs which wouldn't be there if the source weren't closed.
It would be best to force ATI/AMD and nVidea to open their documentation, somehow. IDK how, but it has to be done.
Mass Effect seems to work - and how many layers of abstraction are there in between...?
2014: The coming of the retard fanboys
What's the saying any problem can be solved by adding another layer of indirection. Guess they can't figure out how to monitize contributing coding resources to address the issue.
When comes to open source drivers Intel is way better, however Nvidia has better closed source drivers
Yet their drivers work, are feature complete and Open Source.
I develop OpenGL games in Linux and I never found any real showstopper, then again I use a nvidia card, but still. Maybe the devs aren't that familiar with opengl? Because one can be an accomplished developer without having learned it you know, not saying they suck for that.
I've a fresh install of Mint 16 here on a Thinkpad with an AMD RV710 and the Mesa driver seems to be working fine. Steam games & Netflix work a treat. I haven't installed Chrome, though, it's performance my suck but Chrome is easily avoidable.
Just replaced an "old" Core2 Duo E8200 that started to show random problems but the Core2Duo@2.66Ghz coped with onboard intel G35 graphics coudn't even show a youtube video in 25 or 30FPS in 1080p in Full-sceen :(
Now with an i3@3.5Ghz it does, but uses about 50% CPU
I've never felt compelled to bother with such a setup. I have a rather large monitor. Dunno if I have room for another one like it. On the other hand, the whole "virtual workspace" thing seems to already accomplish a lot of what other people use multiple monitors for.
Perhaps someday when I am REALLY bored I will buy a couple of cards high end enough for this to matter and horse race both operating systems.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
If the drivers are a mess then you cannot use them in a browser because of potential security issues. Native is a different story because you've given an executable permission to run on your system anyway, you've already trusted it. But visiting a web page you haven't invested any trust in that can possibly feed you malformed video and exploit a driver bug is a whole different matter.
There is an issue with quite a few distros being released that do not easily show streaming video. These days one expects video to just work out of the box so to speak.
Very hard to get worked up over this non-issue. If you know enough to be running a Linux system that can support GPU video acceleration without error (or you can understand the cause of the error if it occurs), then you know enough to be able to enable this feature manually.
Why is this even an issue to be concerned about.. Who cares what the default is? It is pretty common practice for companies to ship with defaults that target the lowest common denominator and are the most stable. Google's decision here is inline with that and I cannot really see there being anything to complain about.
My new Haswell i3-4330 in Ubuntu 14.4 beta and Chrome beta doesn't like the GPU-acceleration :( I thought that since the new Chromebooks use Haswell CPU's this should work out of the box...
Because AMD open drivers have accelerated h264 decoding and it has been working.. perfectly for months and almost every user who tried it as far as I know?
The issue isn't subpar driver quality (not that I expect all those misinformed and very outdated opinions about AMD's drivers to go away anytime soon...)
And TFA's invoked reasons puzzled me further:
This guy wants video acceleration forced disabled because users might want to enable it in about:about and encounter bugs?
I am using the latest of the Opera Browsers based on Chromium and it has an option for "hardware-accelerated video decode where available." and Opera is based off of Chromium....
...or it didn't happen!
Google is slowly but surely distancing itself from Linux support in almost all areas of its business.
Good thing Firefox is a much better browser than chrome these days.
Somehow Intel is able to do this but AMD is incapable of writing decent drivers. Great hardware is useless without software which is why I don't own any AMD gear and with the exception of an old PowerMac 9600 never have. I do use Nvidia and put up with their closed drivers on Linux because they do at least function unlike AMD's.
I understand that drivers == performance == competitive advantage, so the vendors want to keep SOMETHING secret, but hasn't the state of the art advanced quite a bit beyond what the vast majority of people need? Can't the vendors just release a plain-vanilla, rock-solid, super-basic driver that offers 90% of the performance? Or hell, even 50%? I mean, if I somehow managed to run Linux on a 75 MHz Pentium with 1 MB onboard VRAM in 1998, surely I should be able to expect *some* acceptable level of performance in 2014 with 1024 times more VRAM. Why is this so hard? You'd think at least ONE vendor would want to be known as "the ones who support Linux really well" -- especially with how Windows 8 is doing.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
"We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon, we choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too." - John F. Kennedy, 12th of September, 1962
They work as long as you're just rendering a desktop. Their 3D performance is abysmal.
First, Linux GPU support for Nvidia (IF you use Nvidia's drivers and not the amateur open-source garbage most ditros now default to) for example, has been very good for many years (I've been using many Nvidia-based Linux systems in an engineering environment for over a decade). Nvidia's drivers have always been pretty good for my needs (I suspect they're built from the same codebase as their Windows drivers) and the solution would even be easier if the Linux fanatics would stop trying to add stuff to Linux for the purely political (rather than FUNCTIONAL) purpose of making it tough to use closed-source code (so much for giving users "freedom"...)
Second, it sounds like you did something dumb and un-professional, "got burned", and are now blaming somebode else. You see, it's HORRENDOUSLY unprofessional to spend "weeks convincing a customer he was better off moving his code base" to something when you yourself have not done your homework and YOU DO NOT KNOW IF WHAT YOU ARE CONVINCING YOUR CLIENT TO DO IS GOING TO WORK. Nobody should trust you for input on their business activities if you value his/her business so little thet you would put his/her money and time at risk like that. The fact that it was Linux, rather than Windows, or Mac, Or BSD, or anything else is moot. The fact that you did not see any need to veryify things would work BEFORE trying to convince a customer/client when it involved an Intel Atom (a realtively new CPU, as opposed to a generic Intel desktop chip) which would be expected to have more "issues" makes this even worse.
There are things about Linux and the "Linux community" that drive me nuts, but in this case the fault for your trouble is entirely yours
I'm sure I've had cases where browsing certain web sites in Chrome on a Windows VM on VMware Workstation on Ubuntu with Nvidia drivers has resulting in system instability as VMware Workstation passes acceleration through from Windows to Ubuntu onto the Nvidia drivers.
I can feel it.
If Google is so confident that it is driver bugs causing issues, then I'm sure they can put together test code to test for and expose the bugs. In other words, instead of complaining, give the vendors code that will show them the issues and allow them to resolve them. You don't have to cover every issue - just share the code you intend to use and let the vendors fix their drivers - OR - show you where your own code is responsible.
Place nail here >+
This is all part of a cunning plan to have Android and/or Chromium enter the desktop/laptop market. Start by denigrating your target.
We are the 198 proof..
The intel HD3000 onwards are not horrible, especially if you are comparing on performance per watt, which is the way the market is headed. The traditional desktop is dying - admittedly a long and protracted death.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
I had the fun recent experience of installing new linux mint on a slightly older thinkpad. Turns out the graphics card is half assed supported on open source drivers and ATI has ejected support from all but the oldest binary drivers. So after running linux for 2 years on a dell D600 with no issues I went to windows 7 where the card is mostly supported on slightly outdated drivers AND it doesn't burn my hand.
I know linux and laptops don't mesh 100% of the time but to me this kind of fuck you to older hardware is just unacceptable. It used to be you could install and enjoy, maybe configure a few things and be on your way. These days every year there is a new distro and older hardware gets the axe almost as quickly as if you had bought used apple hardware and tried to load the latest OSx.
Older distros are as acceptable as running windows XP according to all obvious recommendations. My desktop 4870 is now legacy too. Guess in a short while I'll have to chose between downgrading to X11 v 1.0 or having the fan whir at 100db using radeon while all the apps software render.
Problem solved, come on Google. Valve figured out how to get Steam on Linux and it runs faster than on Windows. They just tell you run Restricted Drivers. It's' that simple.
I'm running the most recent Mint and it prefers to install Nvidia driver version 310.44 as default, claiming it is 'more stable'
the current driver @ Nvidia.com is 331.49.
What Mint considers most stable still causes lock-ups a few times a week usually on boot but can be at odd times.
Why doesn't Mint use the X drivers, well usually they're rubbish.
I've put up with this rubbish over my 19 years of Linux use, s'pose I'm used to it,
have to agree with Google engineers.
Remembering that Linux is only the kernel, it's none of their business,
and X isn't responsible for the binary blobs
and Nvidia doesn't care because there aren't enough Linux users
The dilemma is between proprietary hardware makers and free software writers.
Other side of the coin, why would you use Chrome which is non-free and definitely not trustworthy.
Go well
Seriously, I've used GPUs from all three manufacturers and found every Intel and nvidia hardware/driver combination I've tried to work well in Linux, and every AMD combination to be the opposite. I wish it were not so, but it is, in my experience.
As an AMD customer on Windows, I can assure you that Catalyst sucks on Windows as well. It isn't surprising the open source drivers are not better than Linux Catalyst, IIRC AMD's driver devs are contributing code to the open Radeon driver, so there's part of your problem.
geez, as if google wouldnt have the engineering power ...
I recently installed updates on my Asus Laptop working with Ubuntu 12.04 and it is dead because of drivers update for Radeon graphic card. During booting everything is ok but after logging in display backlight is down.
Unfortunately DVD drive is dead and for strange reason on Asus laptops you cannot boot from USB which brings my laptop dead at the moment. I am setting up PXE server but thinking if I should go back with Linux.
They'd stop android, or replace it with GNUstep... the only chance for Linux on the desktop is GNUstep. Because gtk, qt, fltk and what not are a pain, seriously (and by gtk, qt I mean GNOME and KDE). Likewise goes for Canonical/Ubuntu.
Windoze not found: (C)heer, (P)arty or (D)ance
Yeah, why doesn't Chrome just use OpenGL and be done with it?
The rest of the OS is fast and GPU accelerated. Firefox works just fine and is GPU accelerated.
Same reason as the XBMC distroes. Turn on the system, wait a few moments, and XBMC / Steam appears.
For the rest of us, launching XBMC or Steam from whatever launcher we prefer works fine, but not on a console / set top box.
You don't need Steam OS. I'm running Steam just fine on Slackware. But if you want to plug in the power cable, plugin in controller, turn on power, start playing, you need something that has been set up specifically for that.
What does fascist mean in this context? Are my add-ons supposed to control the browser? That seems worse. Instead of Google spying on me, I get lots of random add-ons from unknown sources spying on me.
ChromeOS is their OS on a hardware thay approved beforehand. Nothing to do with a random Linux machine out there.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
It's not the same as their permanent beta tradition because they are disabling it in Linux by default, and accompanying the disabling by a bunch of language that they don't want to waste developer time trying to make it work which means it's going to get worse, not better. Want WebGL to work? Buy a Mac, not a Chromebook. :(
Imagine what /. fanbois would say if GOOG actually did whitelist the nVidia binary driver only. I know you. You would shoot the messenger. If the messenger was GOOG, you'd shoot him then stab him just to be sure.
Linus says that they fix bugs as fast as new code is added. But code is always swapped out for new designs. Hence, the code that get bug fixed is swapped out soon after. This constant swapping of code also causes unstable ABIs which is a bad thing in Enterprise environments. Imagine you upgrade something, and the ABI has changed which causes you to upgrade another piece etc etc, soon you have been forced to upgrade everything and you dont have the well tested environment anymore. This is a bad thing. Or, you upgrade the Kernel and the device driver has broke, with bugs that only gets triggered during certain circumstances. LTS does not work, because you need to install latest software, which makes you upgrade libraries to newest version, which breaks other stuff, etc - which means you have upgraded everything, leaving LTS.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/09/22/linus_torvalds_linux_bloated_huge/
"Citing an internal Intel study that tracked kernel releases, Bottomley said Linux performance had dropped about two per centage points at every release, for a cumulative drop of about 12 per cent over the last ten releases. "Is this a problem?" he asked.
"We're getting bloated and huge. Yes, it's a problem," said Torvalds."
The weird thing is, Theo said this 5 years ago and was called a Troll
http://www.forbes.com/2005/06/16/linux-bsd-unix-cz_dl_0616theo.html
"[Linux] is terrible," De Raadt says. "Everyone is using it, and they don't realize how bad it is. And the Linux people will just stick with it and add to it rather than stepping back and saying, 'This is garbage and we should fix it.'"....IT company CEO: "You know what I found? Right in the [Linux] kernel, in the heart of the operating system, I found a developer's comment that said, 'Does this belong here?' "Lok says. "What kind of confidence does that inspire? Right then I knew it was time to switch."
Even Linux kernel developer Andrew Morton complains about the declining quality of the Linux kernel. His words:
http://lwn.net/Articles/285088/
Q: Is it your opinion that the quality of the kernel is in decline? Most developers seem to be pretty sanguine about the overall quality problem. Assuming there's a difference of opinion here, where do you think it comes from? How can we resolve it?
A: I used to think it was in decline, and I think that I might think that it still is. I see so many regressions which we never fix.
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Linux-Linus-Torvalds-kernel-too-complex-code,14495.html
"The Linux kernel source code has grown by more than 50-percent in size over the past 39 months, and will cross a total of 15 million lines with the upcoming version 3.3 release.
In an interview with German newspaper Zeit Online, Torvalds recently stated that Linux has become "too complex" and he was concerned that developers would not be able to find their way through the software anymore. He complained that even subsystems have become very complex and he told the publication that he is "afraid of the day" when there will be an error that "cannot be evaluated anymore."
Linux kernel hacker Con Kolivas:
http://ck-hack.blogspot.be/2010/10/other-schedulers-illumos.html
"[After studying the Solaris source code] I started to feel a little embarrassed by what we have as our own Linux kernel. The more I looked at the code, the more it felt like it pretty much did everything the Linux kernel has been trying to do for ages. Not only that, but it's built like an aircraft, whereas ours looks like a garage job with duct tape by comparison"
Linux hackers:
www.kerneltrap.org/Linux/Active_Merge_Windows
"the [Linux source] tree breaks every day, and it's becoming an extremely non-fun environment to work in. We need to slow down the merging, we need to review things more, we need people to test their [...] changes!"
Linux developer Ted Tso, ext4 creator:
http://phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?36507-Large-HDD-SSD-Linux...
"In the case of reiserfs, Chris Mason submitted a patch 4 years ago to tur
Android Linux uses an entirely separate display stack from desktop Linux. You have different hardware, with different drivers and (most importantly) different defects in the drivers.
The difference is that they only blacklist ancient versions of the drivers
And for some GPUs, Firefox blacklists the latest version of the drivers provided by the operating system distributor. On a laptop with an Intel Atom N450 CPU and integrated GPU running Firefox 27.0.1 on Xubuntu 12.04 LTS, with sudo sh -c "apt-get update && apt-get upgrade" run this morning, I have very little acceleration and no WebGL. In about:support, under GPU Accelerated Windows and WebGL Support, I see "Blocked for your graphics card because of unresolved driver issues."
There's no SRPM for Chrome, so it's binary-only
Chromium is Chrome without the proprietary parts. It's not in Fedora for other reasons, mostly related to having to fork and bundle the libraries that it uses in order to add API hooks for needed functionality, which may or may not meet the "modified beyond a certain extent" exception to Fedora's policy on bundled libraries.
My Debian installation regularly manages to lock up nouveau to the point where it has to be shut down via ssh or a hardware switch. This has happened at least once or twice per week for almost a year, more when running any graphics-intensive program. I'm not sure if this is representative, but WTF.
When simply starting the client kills my X session about every third time.
Things like this, is why for a end user desktop Windows is still better. Linux is primarily for servers. If you're going to use a linux desktop... use Ubuntu/Xubuntu whatever desktop you like. But please /. stop trying to be cool and using every alternative to Windows or Ubuntu you can. You're reminding me of the Node hipsters. Trendy bastards, use what works.
I've not had too many problems with them, in the general OS.
GPU issues in chrome on the other hand... loads of them, pages not rendering, video not playing, flash going full berzerk...
makes me wonder where the problem actually lies...
Is pretty cool, has the feel of chrome without the Google. Still in beta though.
http://midori-browser.org/
I have the Intel HD4000/Nvidia 670M and the Bumblebee drivers are hard to get installed and configured in Debian. I don't think they're actually supported in any distro. If I choose to just use the the xserver and driver for nvidia, everything gets unstable, crashes, and/or isn't recognized as supporting 3D. There needs to be a solution. I'd use {gasp!} proprietary drivers if I could.