Re: Electrolysis update: out-of-process plugins and more

On 15-Jun-09, at 2:05 PM, Chris Jones wrote:
>
> We have a complete short-term story for plugin graphics on X11.  
> Windowed plugins are very easy to support, as X windows are  
> identified with cross-process XID's; we need only to create the  
> window in the Gecko process and ship the ID across to the plugin.   
> Windowless plugins are more difficult to support, but we can reuse  
> som work done for Hildon; essentially, we create a window for the  
> windowless plugins and create a surface within that window for the  
> plugin to draw to, but use Xdamage and Xcomposite to composite the  
> Gecko window with the plugin's window. (Graphics folks, if this is a  
> bad summary of this technique, please correct me.)  Ben Turner will  
> likely be working on plugin graphics for Windows, but we're not yet  
> sure of our approach to plugin graphics for OS X.

Shouldn't windowless plugins be easier to support then windowed ones?  
Is there any reason you can't just create a surface in a region of  
memory shared between the plugin process and the Gecko process? It's  
not clear to me what problems are solved by using Xdamage and  
Xcomposite.

This shared memory approach should also work fine on OS X.

-Jeff