Status of Firefox + GPU on BBY-AI?

General Discussion
1

Hi All.

I have a usecase for using BeagleY-AI in a Kiosk environment, but will need to utilize hardware accelerated Firefox in order for smooth user experience.

I remember reading in the early days of BBY-AI that Firefox wasn’t using GPU…evidently there was an experimental build somewhere that @RobertCNelson mentioned, but unsure of what the current status is?

Is this now working in main distro?

2

Our ‘cinnamon’ images had working acceleration thru wayland and it works thru firefox. (3d acceleration)…

Haven’t tested it in a while.

Regards,

3

I can’t find that on /distros page?

4

it wasn’t that useful, Cinnamon 6.2 (with wayland) was badly broken… The only thing that worked, was to start firefox, search quake webgl… :wink:

here’s some weekly builds, Index of /rootfs/debian-arm64-12-bookworm-cinnamon-v6.1-ti but it’s probally broken as i pushed mesa 25.0.0 the other day to the default so i need to update the fake version for ti’s build… (fixed: https://openbeagle.org/beagleboard/ci-mesa-sgx-24.0/-/commit/99a7891aa17e695e957f86684a756cb46deecbae ) ( waiting: pages (#54776) · Jobs · BeagleBoard.org / ci-mesa-sgx-24.0 · GitLab )

Package build finished, triggering a fresh image rebuild…

and uploading as we type: Index of /rootfs/debian-arm64-12-bookworm-cinnamon-v6.1-ti/2025-03-17

edit, (that version of mesa is for v6.12.x) so let’s try this again: ci: bump mesa 25.1.0 (08d67aa9) · Commits · BeagleBoard.org / ci-mesa-sgx-23.3 · GitLab and building ( pages (#54812) · Jobs · BeagleBoard.org / ci-mesa-sgx-23.3 · GitLab )

okay finished again, triggered a new image build.

Okay this looks better…

The following packages will be upgraded:
  libegl-mesa0 libgbm-dev libgbm1 libgl1-mesa-dri libglapi-mesa libglx-mesa0
  libosmesa6 libosmesa6-dev
8 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 30.3 MB of archives.
After this operation, 140 MB of additional disk space will be used.
Get:1 http://debian.beagleboard.org/arm64 bookworm/main arm64 libllvm16 arm64 1:16.0.6-19 [20.6 MB]
Get:2 https://beagleboard.beagleboard.io/ci-mesa-sgx-23.3 stable/main arm64 libglapi-mesa arm64 25.1.0-0.git54812~bookworm [45.4 kB]
Get:3 https://beagleboard.beagleboard.io/ci-mesa-sgx-23.3 stable/main arm64 libgl1-mesa-dri arm64 25.1.0-0.git54812~bookworm [6726 kB]
Get:4 https://beagleboard.beagleboard.io/ci-mesa-sgx-23.3 stable/main arm64 libgbm-dev arm64 25.1.0-0.git54812~bookworm [19.6 kB]
Get:5 https://beagleboard.beagleboard.io/ci-mesa-sgx-23.3 stable/main arm64 libegl-mesa0 arm64 25.1.0-0.git54812~bookworm [112 kB]
Get:6 https://beagleboard.beagleboard.io/ci-mesa-sgx-23.3 stable/main arm64 libgbm1 arm64 25.1.0-0.git54812~bookworm [39.8 kB]
Get:7 https://beagleboard.beagleboard.io/ci-mesa-sgx-23.3 stable/main arm64 libglx-mesa0 arm64 25.1.0-0.git54812~bookworm [146 kB]
Get:8 https://beagleboard.beagleboard.io/ci-mesa-sgx-23.3 stable/main arm64 libosmesa6-dev arm64 25.1.0-0.git54812~bookworm [18.9 kB]
Get:9 https://beagleboard.beagleboard.io/ci-mesa-sgx-23.3 stable/main arm64 libosmesa6 arm64 25.1.0-0.git54812~bookworm [2570 kB]

Okay new version is being uploaded, make sure the time is 2025-03-17 16:42 while the 2025-03-17 14:29 gets overridden by rsync…

https://rcn-ee.net/rootfs/debian-arm64-12-bookworm-cinnamon-v6.1-ti/2025-03-17/

Regards,

1 Like
5

Thanks for this @RobertCNelson

This may be a silly question, but why is this only available with Cinnamon desktop? Why couldnt hardware accelerated firefox work in main distro?

6

Wayland only.

1 Like
7

Hi, same problem. Were you successful? Thx in advance.

8

Well, I did get the image @RobertCNelson linked to load. Also, I confirmed in firefox about:support that hardware acceleration was recognized. But the big problem I had was under about:support it list the individual codecs and whether or not they are using hardware/software rendering. Everything except H264 was using software…I assume this is a limitation of the TI GPU? I dont know.

So the end result was, unless you are specifically decoding H264 video, I’m not sure what benefit there would be?

I ran some test between Cinnamon version linked above and normal BBYAI distro and couldnt tell any meaningful difference in speed between the two firefoxes.