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

Jeff Muizelaar wrote:
> 
> 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.
> 

It's just disgustingly easy to ship XID's from the content to plugin 
process.  Also, all of the Xdamage/Xcomposite code is written and 
tested.  Again, this is the short-term (i.e. something shippable as soon 
as possible) and not long-term (i.e. something we're entirely happy 
with) plan.

In the long run, your shared surface idea is what we want.

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

Interesting!  We should talk more about this, maybe in #gfx.

Cheers,
Chris