WebRender
WebRender is a GPU-based 2D rendering engine written in Rust. Firefox, the research web browser Servo, and other GUI frameworks draw with it. It currently uses the OpenGL API internally.
Note that the canonical home for this code is in gfx/wr folder of the
mozilla-central repository at https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central. The
Github repository at https://github.com/servo/webrender should be considered
a downstream mirror, although it contains additional metadata (such as Github
wiki pages) that do not exist in mozilla-central. Pull requests against the
Github repository are still being accepted, although once reviewed, they will
be landed on mozilla-central first and then mirrored back. If you are familiar
with the mozilla-central contribution workflow, filing bugs in
Bugzilla
and submitting patches there would be preferred.
Update as a Dependency
After updating shaders in WebRender, go to servo and:
- Go to the servo directory and do ./mach update-cargo -p webrender
- Create a pull request to servo
Use WebRender with Servo
To use a local copy of WebRender with servo, go to your servo build directory and:
- Edit Cargo.toml
- Add at the end of the file:
[patch."https://github.com/servo/webrender"]
"webrender" = { path = "<path>/webrender" }
"webrender_api" = { path = "<path>/webrender_api" }
where <path> is the path to your local copy of WebRender.
- Build as normal
Documentation
The Wiki has a few pages describing the internals and conventions of WebRender.
Testing
Tests run using OSMesa to get consistent rendering across platforms.
Still there may be differences depending on font libraries on your system, for
example.
See this gist for
how to make the text tests useful in Fedora, for example.