Open utterances-bot opened 6 months ago
Wonderful, there's so much knowledge packed in here it'll take me a while to absorb all of it. Thanks!
So, I have a question about WebGPU.
A colleague has a web-based app that can use WebGPU; but, recently, our IT has disabled it (Rocky 9, chrome-124).
IT indicates that while the use of WebGPU on a standalone client may/is ok, it is not a safe extension in our Linux environment, that it could crash the GPU.
What's our Linux environment, you may ask? Well, Linux is provided to us via Nice DCV and, so, a number of users (up to about a dozen) could be logged in into the same machine at any given time.
Any idea where such concern is coming from? Do GPUs crash often? Or, is it just the fact that IF it crashes, it takes everybody in the same machine down with it ?
Thanks.
That's a good question, and one that I can only speculate on without knowing more details about the specific machine/OS setup.
GPUs have been trickier to virtualize for that type of hardware sharing than CPUs, as far as I understand. How dependable the isolation is will depend on some mix of the hardware, the drivers, and the OS. It's possible that a GPU crash could affect everyone on the system, yes. Or it could simply be that your IT knows that heavy GPU loads have adverse effects on other users sharing the machine at that time and has taken proactive steps to avoid it.
If that were the case I would expect that other similar mechanisms for accessing the GPU (such as WebGL) would be similarly restricted, as there's nothing about WebGPU that would present a unique complication in that environment, save possibly a known issue with Vulkan that does not affect OpenGL.
In any case, my guess is that the concern is more about overall GPU behavior in that environment and not a specific concern with WebGPU itself. If that's not the case and your IT department has identified concerns unique to WebGPU the Chrome team would like to hear about it! Filing the details at https://issues.chromium.org/ would likely be the best way to get in touch.
Efficiently rendering glTF models | Toji.dev
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https://toji.dev/webgpu-gltf-case-study/