Understanding The Chrome OS Graphics Pipeline With Intel's Driver

If you are curious how the Chrome OS graphics rendering pipeline works, Tiago Vignatti and Dongseong Hwang of Intel's Open-Source Technology Center has written an interesting article about how they achieve zero-copy texture uploads in Chrome OS and other details of their low-level graphics implementation.

"This document outlines some optimization work for Web applications running in Chrome OS. It consists of using the parallelism between the CPU and GPU under Intel® architecture to render Web content faster, save system memory, and extend battery life by using a technique called zero-copy texture upload. Content based on JavaScript* and CSS HTML5 should be faster and feel smoother with the additions described in this document. Intel's Open Source Technology Center (OTC) has been working together with Google so users can transparently benefit from this optimization on Intel architecture in the next versions of Chrome OS."

You can read their white-paper in full via this 01.org blog post. Users with Chrome can play around with the latest Intel open-source driver advancements by launching Chrome with the --enable-native-gpu-memory-buffers --enable-zero-copy arguments.