While some of us had it turned on for some time, some didn’t. Looks like it is fully stable now.
Yey! Test it by starting intel_gpu_top and than playing video in firefox, if row “Video” goes over 0.0% it is working!
intel-gpu-top: Intel Coffeelake (Gen9) @ /dev/dri/card0 - 921/ 925 MHz; 38% RC6
1.78/10.41 W; 813 irqs/s
IMC reads: 3883 MiB/s
IMC writes: 1632 MiB/s
ENGINES BUSY MI_SEMA MI_WAIT
Render/3D 12.82% |████▊ | 0% 0%
Blitter 0.00% | | 0% 0%
Video 27.99% |██████████▍ | 0% 0%
VideoEnhance 0.00% | | 0% 0%
PID NAME Render/3D Blitter Video VideoEnhance
578 RDD Process | || ||███ || |
32431 firefox-bin |▊ || || || |
2301 elogind-daemon |▌ || || || |
4151 pcmanfm-qt | || || || |
4153 keepassxc | || || || |
4154 pasystray | || || || |
4521 slack | || || || |
6067 chrome | || || || |
29222 jcef_helper | || || || |
Of course, you need second monitor, it goes down to 0 if video is not visible, since Firefox is not rendering it.
Official release notes: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/115.0/releasenotes/
VAAPI has been around for a while. Do you know why it took so long for Firefox to integrate?
@ghariksforge @monobot the tl;dr is that most of the time it took was because it wasn’t properly sandboxed, and the rest of the time to sand out the edge cases and bugs to guarantee it worked properly for everyone
Bugs.
There has been a hell of a lot of work done here both in Firefox, as well as other projects like mesa to get this enabled.
It was already integrated for non Intel GPUs
That’s not what has happened here. This is the first time any major browser has enabled vaapi hardware acceleration by default on Linux.
It has been previously available either to users who have switched it on, or maintainers who changed the upstream default.
They are initially enabling for intel only due to some amd bugs that need to be ironed out. AMD will be next.