UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:56.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/56.0

Steps to reproduce the problem:
This is a bug that was discovered on an ARM Meson8 board, which features a Mali 450 GPU, running EndlessOS. Upon upgrading to chromium 61, we noticed that hardware video acceleration was broken:

1. Open any youtube video
2. Notice the unbearably slow playback, as well as an error message on stderr saying:

[1288:1288:1012/112259.113580:ERROR:v4l2_video_decode_accelerator.cc(244)] : Initialize(): context does not have EGL_KHR_fence_sync

What is the expected behavior?

What went wrong?
The platform on which this issue was observed runs a linux desktop environment based on X11. Therefore, chromium is being compiled with X11 support. However, the GLX implementation is provided by Mesa and is not hw accelerated, so one needs to use EGL/GLES provided by the SoC vendor to get proper hw acceleration.

The issue in this case is that chromium, although it is trying to use EGL, it loads the wrong EGL implementation (it loads ANGLE, which uses GLX as a backend, instead of loading the Mali EGL/GLES libraries from the system)

There is a function called InitializeStaticEGLInternal() in ui/gl/init/gl_initializer_x11.cc that is responsible for dlopen()ing the EGL and GLES libraries, when it has been determined that EGL/GLES is to be used. Before chromium 61, this function was testing whether it should load the internal ANGLE implementation with a check that looked like:

if (use_gl == kGLImplementationANGLEName) {

This used to fail and therefore the code would fall back to loading the system "libEGL.so.1" and "libGLESv2.so.2" instead of the ANGLE implementations.

In chromium 61 this code has been reworked and reads:

  // initializes variables to point to the system implementation
  base::FilePath glesv2_path(kGLESv2LibraryName);
  base::FilePath egl_path(kEGLLibraryName);

  if (implementation == kGLImplementationSwiftShaderGL) {
    // ...
    glesv2_path = module_path.Append(kGLESv2SwiftShaderLibraryName);
    egl_path = module_path.Append(kEGLSwiftShaderLibraryName);
  } else {
    // ...
    glesv2_path = module_path.Append(kGLESv2ANGLELibraryName);
    egl_path = module_path.Append(kEGLANGLELibraryName);
  }

With this code it is now impossible for the system implementation to be loaded, as the code will always load ANGLE.

I have created a patch that aggressively disables loading ANGLE on ARM (attached), however I understand that this is a hack and cannot be upstreamed like this. I would very much like your input on how to approach this in a way that it can be upstreamed.

Did this work before? Yes 60

Chrome version: 61.0.3163.79 (Developer Build)  Channel: n/a
OS Version: Endless 3.4.0
Flash Version: N/A
 

Deleted: 0001-Fix-loading-of-the-vendor-EGL-GLES-stack-on-ARM.patch 1.9 KB

0001-Fix-loading-of-the-vendor-EGL-GLES-stack-on-ARM.patch 1.9 KB Download