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> Servo makes incredibly good use of the GPU.

Too good, in fact: it won't run on any laptops that I own because their GPUs don't support a sufficient level of OpenGL.

One great aspect of Firefox-with-Gecko is that you can throw it onto just about any machine with more than 512MB of RAM and it will provide bootstrap web access ( slow or otherwise ). That's going to be lost when everything is Servoised. I guess it's back to links2 at that point.




How old are your laptops?

For ease of development, webrender2 is configured to compile with the latest OpenGl 4.x features. I believe there is a way to build it to target a lower OpenGl version.

Edit: Correction, its currently targeted at OpenGl 3.2. There's an open issue for bringing it down to OpenGl 3.1 which is the version supported by integrated Sandybridge GPUs. Considering 40% of people running Intel are using Sandybridge or older, that's probably why it wont run on your laptops.


Youngest laptop here is from 2011:

Intel Corporation Mobile GM965/GL960 Integrated Graphics Controller

OpenGL renderer string: Mesa DRI Intel(R) 965GM

Maximum OpenGL version for that chipset is 2.0, apparently, though I can't find a way to push it beyond 1.4 on Linux

I appreciate that six years old is ancient by SV standards but I would be interested to learn what proportion of Firefox users are on equally old hardware. I did try launching Servo with CPU rendering but it hung indefinitely.


Servo isn't a production ready consumer browser and it won't be for a long time because its purpose is to facilitate research into parallel browser engines. While a 2007 chipset may not be very old among the average consumer, it is probably not going to work for a developer machine that's going to be compiling a huge codebase under active development.

I don't think the software fallback has gotten much love but AFAIK it'll work fine once llvmpipe support is added to webrender2 [1]. Once that is done, rendering will work with the vast majority of laptops and desktops running Linux/MacOS/Windows. The OpenGL version supported by that chipset is over a decade old so devoting time to compatibility this early in the project would be a waste of time (and defeat the purpose since the standard predates the explosion of mobile devices).

[1] https://github.com/servo/servo/issues/13653


AFAIK that's not actually true, one option they have is going through Mesa's llvmpipe in such cases.

EDIT: to be clear, with the Servo nightlies you need to do this yourself but Firefox could bundle it eventually.




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