Intel Adds Native One-Copy Texture Uploads To Chrome OS

Engineers at Intel's Open-Source Technology Center have implemented native, one-copy texture uploads for Chrome/Chromium OS when using Intel graphics processors.

With Chrome M50, fifth generation Intel CPUs are initially supported while they intend to support native one-copy texture uploads going forward to all users of Intel Core and Atom hardware.

This one-copy texture uploading will be enabled by default rather than the zero-copy uploads. One-copy texture uploads is being used to support tiled storage textures for compositing and enabling partial raster for rasterizing only regions of a web page where contents have changed. With zero-copy texture uploads this is not possible and the overall goal of this work is improving Chrome's speed and reducing power and memory use by cutting down on unnecessary texture copying between the CPU and GPU.

Over on Intel's 01.org blog are extensive details about this native one-copy work for Chrome OS. Intel's Dongseong Hwang noted, "Intel processor graphics architecture shares DRM between the GPU and CPU to enable zero-copy buffer transfers. Through collaboration with the Chromium community, our test cases show that zero-copy results in performance boosts between 67% to 114%, memory savings of 55%, and 35% power savings. Native one-copy texture uploads are enabled in fifth-generation Intel Core processors, and soon additional Core and Atom processors will also take advantage of native one-copy as well."