Experimental Code Allows Vulkan-Accelerated Gecko/Firefox On Linux

Written by Michael Larabel in Mozilla on 31 August 2018 at 07:08 AM EDT. 28 Comments
MOZILLA
With some out-of-tree code of Firefox Nightly with a modified version of Gecko using GFX-RS, it's possible to use the web-browser powered by the Vulkan API on Linux.

Hungarian developer Attila Dusnoki shared the milestone this week of being able to run Gecko with Vulkan on Linux.

This is part of the effort to run Gecko with GFX-RS. GFX-RS, of course, is the Rust portability initiative with low-level graphics abstractions to map to Vulkan, Metal, Direct3D, etc, depending upon the platform.

With the very experimental Gecko code paired with GFX-RS, this can mean using Vulkan for GPU acceleration of the Firefox code. Besides building the out-of-tree code, the environment variables MOZ_ACCELERATED=1 MOZ_WEBRENDER=1 need also be set.

Before getting too excited, Dusnoki warned, "this is VERY experimental ;)"
Related News
About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

Popular News This Week