[webkit-dev] Could it be possble to run WebKit from different threads (not simultaneously)?

Pedriana, Paul ppedriana at ea.com
Mon May 27 17:11:58 PDT 2013


> But that is only one of many, many things we had to solve.
> I second Darin that using WebKit2 reduces the surface exposed
> to threads and would simplify your work.

Thanks, but our platforms (e.g. XBox, PlayStation) don't support multiple user processes. That's an intentional design decision by the platform makers for the purpose of making them as responsive as possible.

I'm thinking that we might go down the path of having WebKit for us in this use-case act like a job that has a fixed CPU and thread affinity (always execute on the same CPU and in the context of the same thread). Web worker threads and storage threads are another issue, but they don't look like much of a problem, as they seem pretty flexible.




From: ikipou at gmail.com [mailto:ikipou at gmail.com] On Behalf Of Benjamin Poulain
Sent: Monday, May 27, 2013 3:20 PM
To: Pedriana, Paul
Cc: Darin Adler; webkit-dev at lists.webkit.org
Subject: Re: [webkit-dev] Could it be possble to run WebKit from different threads (not simultaneously)?

On Mon, May 27, 2013 at 2:38 PM, Pedriana, Paul <ppedriana at ea.com<mailto:ppedriana at ea.com>> wrote:
> It's straightforward to get this mostly working, probably a matter of weeks. Given our
> experience with iOS I would say that getting it to work reliably is probably a multi-month
> or even multi-year project for a determined team with multiple WebKit experts.
That's for enabling it to run in multiple threads at separate times? I wouldn't think #1 and #3
would be a problem for us, as we have tight control on our side over when WebKit is entered.
It's not clear to me at this point what we would need to do about AtomicStringTable and its usage.

One AtomicStringTable is defined per thread and is stored in thread local storage.
You can get an idea of the way we deal with that by looking at the code guarded with USE(WEB_THREAD).

But that is only one of many, many things we had to solve. I second Darin that using WebKit2 reduces the surface exposed to threads and would simplify your work.

Benjamin
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