[wpe-webkit] WPE on i.MX6 platform

[Lars Jeppesen]

Hi Adrian,

Thank you very much for your help.
I was able to make a working build by following the Wandboard guide (https://github.com/Igalia/meta-webkit/wiki/Wandboard) and adjust it for my Sabre i.MX6 Quad Plus board.

But I'm not impressed by the performance. Could there be some problem?
I ran some benchmarks to compare it to a Chromium build that I have. (Based on the Linux guide from NXP)
Here are the results:

WPE: Octane 2.0 = 1463, LiteBrite (Chrome logo) 34 secs.
Chromium: Octane 2.0 = 2590, LiteBrite (Chrome logo) 29 secs.

I wanted to also try Basemark Web 3.0 benchmark, but I couldn't get this to run.

Best regards
  Lars

-----Original Message-----
From: Adrian Perez de Castro <aperez at igalia.com> 
Sent: 28. maj 2018 19:31
To: Lars Jeppesen <LJE at foss.dk>
Cc: webkit-wpe at lists.webkit.org
Subject: Re: [wpe-webkit] WPE on i.MX6 platform

Hello Lars,

First of all, thanks a lot for your interest in WPE! Remember that depending on the time of the day, many of us may be available in the Freenode #webkit channel as well -- in case you want to shoot some quick question our way :)

I will comment inline below.

On Sun, 27 May 2018 20:10:43 +0000, Lars Jeppesen <LJE at foss.dk> wrote:
 
> I'm trying to get WPE running on NXP/i.MX6. I'm not sure if I have 
> chosen the right path, so I could use some advice.
>
> What I have tried is to use the Yocto BSP provided by NXP (Linux
> 4.9.11_1.0.0) and then add the yocto/meta-wpe layer (morty-branch) In 
> my local.conf I have added the following:
> 
> DISTRO_FEATURES_remove = "x11"
> DISTRO_FEATURES_append = " opengl wayland"
> IMAGE_INSTALL_append = " packagegroup-wpe"
> WPE_BACKEND="wayland"
> WPE_PLATFORM="egl"
>
> Could this work at all?  (I got it to build with some fiddling, but it 
> segfaults at startup) Is there an easier/better way to get WPE to run 
> on i.MX6?  [...]

While this could work, I haven't used the “meta-wpe” layer myself for quite some time, I would strongly recommend you to use the “meta-webkit” layer instead. The reason for this is that we try to maintain as close as possible to upstream WebKit, and because of that already supports WPE WebKit version 2.20.0, which is our first *stable* release. You can find the layer at:

  https://github.com/Igalia/meta-webkit/

The wiki for this repository has some notes on how to use it in general, and some notes in particular for i.MX6, which happens to be one of the platforms we are been actively developing for:

  https://github.com/Igalia/meta-webkit/wiki/WPE
  https://github.com/Igalia/meta-webkit/wiki/i.MX6

I am confident that the instructions in this last link should get you a working image. Please give it a try, and let us know if you run into any issue -- we want to ensure that the build process is as smooth as possible (always hard when cross-compiling) and feedback is always valuable.

As for a simpler way, I am currently in the middle of preparing an overlay for Buildroot (using BR2_EXTERNAL) for WPE; but it still needs some love before we can recommend it.

Last but not least, you can always build for x86_64 and run your WPE on your laptop/desktop PC. It's probably the easiest option, and even if your final target is some embedded device, you can use this for faster development.

> [...] I can see that raspberry pi tutorial uses westeros, is this 
> requirement or can it run on wayland/Weston as well?

Westeros is not a requirement. It just happens to be the compositor that the RDK [1] images tend to use by default. WPE will happily work on most Wayland compositors [2] using the FDO backend or the RDK one (with the Wayland support enabled), and directly on the framebuffer if you use the RDK backend (with the
i.MX6 support enabled).

I hope this helps.

Best regards,


--
 Adrián 🎩

---
[1] http://rdkcentral.com/
[2] At least we know Weston, GNOME Shell, and Sway/wlroots work fine. I expect
    other wlroots-based compositors to work as well.