Firefox hardware acceleration issue

athan · 2024-10-30 13:43:31

I'm using a clean installation of latest Arch, X, XFCE and Firefox, 13600K CPU and Radeon RX-6600
Firefox about:support shows hardware acceleration disabled (Blocklisted; failure code FEATURE_FAILURE_VIDEO_DECODING_TEST_FAILED)
Following wiki instructions and enabling config settings media.ffmpeg.vaapi.enabled and media.hardware-video-decoding.force-enabled seems to have fixed the lack of acceleration issue but a new problem arises after enabled those two settings.
The .xsession-errors log is now filled with repeated error messages "Failed to create /home/username/.cache/mesa_shader_cache for shader cache (Permission denied)---disabling"

BTW, vainfo shows everything OK

vainfo: VA-API version: 1.22 (libva 2.22.0)
vainfo: Driver version: Mesa Gallium driver 24.2.5-arch1.1 for AMD Radeon RX 6600 (radeonsi, navi23, LLVM 18.1.8, DRM 3.59, 6.11.5-arch1-1)
vainfo: Supported profile and entrypoints
      VAProfileMPEG2Simple            :	VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileMPEG2Main              :	VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileVC1Simple              :	VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileVC1Main                :	VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileVC1Advanced            :	VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileH264ConstrainedBaseline:	VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileH264ConstrainedBaseline:	VAEntrypointEncSlice
      VAProfileH264Main               :	VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileH264Main               :	VAEntrypointEncSlice
      VAProfileH264High               :	VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileH264High               :	VAEntrypointEncSlice
      VAProfileHEVCMain               :	VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileHEVCMain               :	VAEntrypointEncSlice
      VAProfileHEVCMain10             :	VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileHEVCMain10             :	VAEntrypointEncSlice
      VAProfileJPEGBaseline           :	VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileVP9Profile0            :	VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileVP9Profile2            :	VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileAV1Profile0            :	VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileNone                   :	VAEntrypointVideoProc

Reverting media.ffmpeg.vaapi.enabled and media.hardware-video-decoding.force-enabled back to disabled fix these errors but disables GPU acceleration.

Any idea?

Last edited by athan (2024-10-30 13:48:28)

Lone_Wolf · 2024-10-31 11:15:17

Please post the outputs of

$ stat ~/.cache/
$ stat ~/.cache/mesa_shader_cache/

athan · 2024-10-31 14:01:34

Thanks for your willingness to help.
Permissions look OK to me...

  File: /home/athan/.cache/
  Size: 4096      	Blocks: 8          IO Block: 4096   directory
Device: 8,18	Inode: 5242899     Links: 25
Access: (0755/drwxr-xr-x)  Uid: ( 1000/   athan)   Gid: ( 1000/   athan)
Access: 2023-12-04 06:27:14.852748388 +0200
Modify: 2024-10-30 11:36:03.137431093 +0200
Change: 2024-10-30 11:36:03.137431093 +0200
 Birth: 2023-12-04 04:57:26.139999758 +0200

  File: /home/athan/.cache/mesa_shader_cache/
  Size: 4096      	Blocks: 8          IO Block: 4096   directory
Device: 8,18	Inode: 5243095     Links: 2
Access: (0700/drwx------)  Uid: ( 1000/   athan)   Gid: ( 1000/   athan)
Access: 2024-10-30 11:36:03.137431093 +0200
Modify: 2024-10-30 11:36:03.137431093 +0200
Change: 2024-10-30 11:56:03.596195801 +0200
 Birth: 2024-10-30 11:36:03.137431093 +0200

Last edited by athan (2024-10-31 14:03:23)

Lone_Wolf · 2024-10-31 15:45:29

~/.cache permissions are silghtly different for me (no xr -x ) , but mesa_shader_cache is same.

After changing those 2 settings through about:config I get a similar message.

Failed to create /home for shader cache (Permission denied)---disabling.

I'm not convinced this is a permission error, it kinda looks like firefox may be using a wrong path.

What is the exact message you get in the x error log ?
Are you using firefox from repos and what version (post pacman -Qi firefox output if unsure) ?

athan · 2024-10-31 17:23:39

The exact message I'm getting is

Failed to create /home/athan/.cache/mesa_shader_cache for shader cache (Permission denied)---disabling

Actually .xsession-errors is filled with repeated copies of that message.

Are you using firefox from repos and what version (post pacman -Qi firefox output if unsure) ?

Yes, everything including Firefox is from repos (core & extra).

PS: I could of course not use those two settings but then the about:support says that hardware video acceleration is not used.

Last edited by athan (2024-10-31 17:25:18)

athan · 2024-10-31 19:20:13

Please check the following topic (use a translator). It's exactly the same issue. A Firefox bug maybe...
https://bbs.archlinuxcn.org/viewtopic.php?id=14578

Last edited by athan (2024-10-31 19:20:42)

athan · 2024-10-31 19:38:01

-

Last edited by athan (2024-10-31 19:39:00)

Lone_Wolf · 2024-11-01 11:10:06

That thread is indeed about the same issue. It does seem to be related to the sandbox / seccomp , but no real solution was found.

Last 2 posts of the thread :

One suspicious thing I've found so far is that it's related to the VA-API, after I set media.ffmpeg.vaapi.enabled to false in about:config, no matter how much I play the video again, I don't get this error message.
I can't find the exact cause of this error, so I'm going to block it for now by using systemd-run --user -p StandardOutput=null -p StandardError=null firefox.

That seems to ignore the errors and is at best a workaround .

I'll continue to use firefox without HW video-acceleration and play videos that need it outside of the browser.
(Which is my preferred method to watch them anyway)

Can you try with a fresh linux user with minimal configuration ?
This would help to confirm whether the issue is systemwide or user-specific .

athan · 2024-11-01 17:36:18

Lone_Wolf wrote:

Can you try with a fresh linux user with minimal configuration ?
This would help to confirm whether the issue is systemwide or user-specific .

I did that; no difference unfortunately.
Enabling HW acceleration brings back the error.

Lone_Wolf · 2024-11-02 11:10:09

Does HW acceleration function ( lower cpu usage - increased gpu during playing, less stutter etc) despite of the error ?

Can you try with older firefox versions ?

athan · 2024-11-03 04:12:43

It doesn't seem to make any difference with non-accelerated or it's too small to be noticed.
It's the about:support screen that shows HW acceleration disabled when the above settings are not used.

May I ask you, are you using those two settings?
And if not, does your about:support shows acceleration disabled (blocked)?

Lone_Wolf · 2024-11-03 10:36:00

I don't

HARDWARE_VIDEO_DECODING	
default	available		
runtime	unavailable	Force disabled by gfxInfo	Blocklisted; failure code FEATURE_FAILURE_VIDEO_DECODING_TEST_FAILED

I leave media.ffmpeg.vaapi.enabled and media.hardware-video-decoding.force-enabled at their default values, so false .

My processor has 12 cores and 24 threads, and I setup heavy processes like compiling to not touch 6 threads .
This leaves enough room for software decoding .

For movie playing I mostly use vlc which is also set to sw decoding and rarely misses frames at 2560 x 1440 resolution .

VA-API used to be hit and miss on amd cards with the misses resulting in worse performance then with sw decoding .
I haven't tested if that has improved in the last 4 years.

It probably helps that my primary nvme drive is small (just 250 GiB) but was one of the fastest available in 2018 Q4 when I purchased this system.

athan · 2024-11-03 13:26:51

It looks like you're probably right to have them disabled and I'm thinking of adopting this practice myself, at least for now.
However, I have to admit that I expected an opensource application like Firefox to behave more harmoniously on linux than on Windows or MacOS but that's probably not the case...

Thanks for the help, I appreciate that!

BryanLiang · 2024-11-03 13:48:44

I am the one who posted on bbs.archlinuxcn.org, I have filed the bug on firefox bugzilla, see: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1921742.

athan · 2024-11-03 23:20:47

BryanLiang wrote:

I am the one who posted on bbs.archlinuxcn.org, I have filed the bug on firefox bugzilla, see: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1921742.

That's great, hopefully there will be a fix soon. Thanks for the notice!

Arch Linux

#1 2024-10-30 13:43:31

Firefox hardware acceleration issue

#2 2024-10-31 11:15:17

Re: Firefox hardware acceleration issue

#3 2024-10-31 14:01:34

Re: Firefox hardware acceleration issue

#4 2024-10-31 15:45:29

Re: Firefox hardware acceleration issue

#5 2024-10-31 17:23:39

Re: Firefox hardware acceleration issue

#6 2024-10-31 19:20:13

Re: Firefox hardware acceleration issue

#7 2024-10-31 19:38:01

Re: Firefox hardware acceleration issue

#8 2024-11-01 11:10:06

Re: Firefox hardware acceleration issue

#9 2024-11-01 17:36:18

Re: Firefox hardware acceleration issue

#10 2024-11-02 11:10:09

Re: Firefox hardware acceleration issue

#11 2024-11-03 04:12:43

Re: Firefox hardware acceleration issue

#12 2024-11-03 10:36:00

Re: Firefox hardware acceleration issue

#13 2024-11-03 13:26:51

Re: Firefox hardware acceleration issue

#14 2024-11-03 13:48:44

Re: Firefox hardware acceleration issue

#15 2024-11-03 23:20:47

Re: Firefox hardware acceleration issue

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