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

On 16/6/09 6:23 AM, 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?

Yes, there is a reason. Windowless plugins require an X drawable to be 
passed into them.

Rob