Re: Chromium acceleration

[Eric Nelson <eric.nelson@boundarydevices.com>]

Hi Diego,

On 03/21/2014 04:49 AM, Diego wrote:
> Otavio Salvador wrote:
>> Eric Nelson wrote:
>>> A simplistic test shows that it's really straightforward to
>>> add both Chromium and Firefox into fsl-image-gui by pulling
>>> in meta-browser.
>>
>> The biggest problem adding more stuff is maintenance. This increases
>> build time and tests needed for a good coverage.
>>
>> What people think?
>
> Hi Otavio and Eric,
>
> I think we can sum up your discussion in two points:
> - web applications and in general browser usage is really important nowadays
> in general, and it is taking its share of interest also in the embedded world;
> - firefox and chromium require quite a lot of resources both in terms of
> maintenance and in terms of build time and computation.
>
> I can confirm both points, as we have a couple of projects using Chromium. So
> on one hand it is something important to support and test regularly (and that
> would help finding build breakages), on the other hand build takes a lot time,
> and an overwhelming amount of RAM. I used to build images with Firefox and
> Chromium 29 with 6 bitbake build threads and it worked on a 4GB of RAM and 2GB
> swap, but now with Chromium 35 I had to pump up the VM to 12GB of RAM (8GB
> still killed the final ld linking process, which is the real "RAM eater").
>
> So while testing browsers would be nice, I think the best option would be to
> test it somehow separately from the fsl-image-gui. Do you think defining an
> image in meta-browser would make sense?
>

I wasn't suggesting that Chromium or Firefox be included in
fsl-image-gui. Only that meta-browser (and I think meta-gnome as a
dependency) be included in the default manifest.

This will prevent the need to "git clone" the repositories separately,
and allow inclusion through local.conf.

Regards,


Eric