electron: 3.0 regression: gpu process is started despite app.disableHardwareAcceleration() (and offscreen mode)

Output of node_modules/.bin/electron --version: v3.0.0-beta.7 (x86)
Operating System (Platform and Version): win7 sp1 x64
Output of node_modules/.bin/electron --version on last known working Electron version (if applicable): v2.0.8 (x86)

Expected Behavior gpu process should not be started, as in 2.0.8

Actual behavior gpu process is started and it exits with error

[9276:0822/202731.860:ERROR:viz_main_impl.cc(195)] Exiting GPU process due to errors during initialization
[9684:0822/202731.869:ERROR:browser_gpu_channel_host_factory.cc(119)] Failed to launch GPU process.
[9684:0822/202731.869:ERROR:gpu_process_transport_factory.cc(1017)] Lost UI shared context.

To Reproduce

run

electron.exe --enable-logging offscreen.js

offsreen.js

const { app, BrowserWindow } = require('electron')

const OFFSCREEN = true

if (OFFSCREEN)
  app.disableHardwareAcceleration()

let win

app.once('ready', () => {
  win = new BrowserWindow({
    width: 340,
    height: 240,
    webPreferences: {
      offscreen: OFFSCREEN,
    }
  })

  if (win.webContents.isOffscreen())
    win.webContents.setFrameRate(1)
  
  console.log('%O', {offscreen: win.webContents.isOffscreen(), frameRate: win.webContents.getFrameRate()})
  
  win.webContents.on('paint', (event, dirty, image) => {
    console.log('paint')
  })
  
  win.loadURL('about:blank')
    
  
})

About this issue

Original URL
State: closed
Created 6 years ago
Reactions: 1
Comments: 16 (7 by maintainers)

Most upvoted comments

the tl;dr from that Chrome issue is:

The gpu process isn’t just for hardware acceleration. When hw acceleration is disabled, SwiftShader and viz still run in the gpu process. “gpu” is a bit of a misnomer.
There are a couple of short-lived processes launched during startup that are redundant with --disable-gpu, fixed by https://crrev.com/960c955a6. That revision does not affect the long-lived “gpu” process.
If you really, really want to drop processes, you can try --in-process-gpu. If you also want to disable SwiftShader (and lose WebGL support), --disable-software-rasterizer is there for you.

--in-process-gpu is a substantial deviation from the way Chromium generally expects to operate and I expect it to be somewhat less stable than running in the default mode with a separate gpu process (for instance, we would be unable to recover from a crash in the compositor, as that would crash the main process when running with --in-process-gpu).

We should make sure we have a JS hook that runs early enough that adding --in-process-gpu to the command-line switches is effective, but app.disableHardwareAcceleration() should not add that switch by default.

nornagon on Mar 1, 2019

--in-process-gpu does not suppered in WINDOWS, the page will not render, but the IOS platform is ok

dingchaoyan1983 on Apr 29, 2019

Working with Electron 4.1, Greenworks and Steam in the Windows environment, we need to use --in-process-gpu to enable the Steam overlay. Currently, due to the issue commented above, we need to add the --in-process-gpu command line switch during the launch of the app (e.g. app.exe --in-process-gpu). As noted above, if we try to use app.commandLine.appendSwitch the app becomes unstable, intermittently crashing.

All this is to say that we also would like to see, so we can add that switch to the code and do not need to rely on adding the command line switch actually on the command line.

“We should make sure we have a JS hook that runs early enough that adding --in-process-gpu to the command-line switches is effective…”

MikalDev on Mar 22, 2019