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One of my main work items this year was the conversion of the graphics portions of Mozilla's SVG implementation to directly use Moz2D APIs instead of using the old gfxContext/gfxASurface Thebes APIs. This pair of posts will provide some information on that work. This post will give some background and information on the conversion process, while part 2 will provide some discussion about the benefits of the work and what steps we might want to carry out next.
For background on why Mozilla is building Moz2D (formerly called Azure) and how it can improve Mozilla's performance see some of the earlier posts by Joe, Bas and Robert.
When Moz2D was first being put together it was initially developed and tested as an alternative rendering backend for Mozilla's implementation of HTML <canvas>. Canvas was chosen as the initial testbed because its drawing is largely self contained, it requires a relatively small number of features from any rendering backend, and because we knew from profiling that it was being particularly impacted by Thebes/cairo overhead.
As Moz2D started to become more stable, Thebes' gfxContext class was extended to allow it to wrap a Moz2D DrawTarget (prior to that it was backed only by an instance of a Thebes gfxASurface subclass, in turn backed by a cairo_surface_t). This might seem a bit strange since, after all, Moz2D is supposed to replace Thebes, not be wrapped by it adding yet another layer of abstraction and overhead. However, it was an important step to allow the Graphics team to start testing Moz2D on Mozilla's more complicated, non-canvas, rendering scenarios. It allowed many classes of Moz2D bugs and missing Moz2D features to be worked on/out before beginning a larger effort to convert the masses of non-canvas rendering code to Moz2D.
In order to switch any of the large number of instances of gfxContext to be backed by a DrawTarget, any code that might encounter that gfxContext and try to get a gfxASurface from it had to be updated to handle DrawTargets too. For example, lots of forks in the code had to be added to BasicLayerManager, and gfxFont required a new GlyphBufferAzure class to be written. As this work progressed some instances of Thebes gfxContexts were permanently flipped to being backed by a Moz2D DrawTarget, helping keep working Moz2D code paths from regressing.
Towards the end of 2013 it was felt that Moz2D was sufficiently ready to start thinking about converting Mozilla's layout code to use Moz2D directly and eliminate its use of gfxContext API. (The layout code being the code that decides where and how most things are placed on the screen, and by far the biggest consumer of the graphics code.) Before committing a lot of engineering time and resources to a large scale conversion, Jet wanted to convert a specific part of the layout code to ensure that Moz2D could meet its needs and determine what performance benefits it could provide to layout. The SVG code was chosen for this purpose since it was considered to be the most complicated to convert (if Moz2D could work for SVG, it could work for the rest of layout).
After drawing up a rough list of the work to convert the SVG code to Moz2D I got stuck in. The initial plan was to add code paths to the SVG code to check for and extract DrawTargets from gfxContexts that were passed in (if the gfxContext was backed by one) and operate directly on the DrawTarget in that case. (At some future point the Thebes forks could then be removed.) It soon became apparent that these forks were often not how we would want the code to be structured on completion of Moz2D conversion though. To leverage Moz2D more effectively I frequently found myself wanting to refactor the code quite substantially, and in ways that were not compatible with the existing Thebes code paths. Rather than spending months writing suboptimal Moz2D code paths only to have to rewrite things again when we got rid of the Thebes paths I decided to save time in the long run and first make sure that any gfxContexts that were passed into SVG code would be wrapping a DrawTarget. That way maintaining Thebes forks would be unnecessary.
It wasn't trivial to determine which gfxContexts might end up being passed to SVG code. The complexity of the code paths and the virtually limitless permutations in which Web content can be combined meant that I only identified about a dozen gfxContexts that could not end up in SVG code. As a result I ended up working to convert all gfxContexts in the Mozilla code. (The small amount of additional work to convert the instances that couldn't end up in SVG code allowed us to reduce a whole bunch of code complexity (and remove a lot of then dead code) and simplified things for other devs working with Thebes/Moz2D.)
Ensuring that all the gfxContexts that might be passed to SVG code would be backed by a DrawTarget turned out to be quite a task. I started this work when relatively few gfxContexts had been converted to wrap a DrawTarget so unsurprisingly things were a bit rough. I tripped over several Moz2D bugs at this point. Mostly though the headaches were caused by the amount of code that assumed gfxContexts wrapped and could provide them with a gfxASurface/cairo_surface_t/platform library object, possibly getting or then passing those objects from/to seemingly far corners of the Mozilla code. Particularly challenging was converting the image code where the sources and destinations of gfxASurfaces turned out to be particularly far reaching requiring the code to be converted incrementally in 34 separate bugs. Doing this without temporary performance regressions was tricky.
Besides preparing the ground for the SVG conversion, this work resulted in a decent number of performance improvements in its own right.
Converting the SVG code to Moz2D was a lot more than a simple case of switching calls from one graphics API to another. The stateful context provided by a retained mode API like Thebes or cairo allows consumer code to set context state (for example, fill pattern, or anti-alias mode) in points of the code that can seem far removed from other code that takes an action (for example, filling a path) that relies on that state having been set. The SVG code made use of this a lot since in many cases (for example, when passing things through for callbacks) it simplified the code to only pass a context rather than a context and some state to set.
This wouldn't have been all that bad if it wasn't for another fundamental difference between Thebes/cairo and Moz2D -- in Moz2D paths and patterns are relative to user-space, whereas in Thebes/cairo they are relative to device-space. Whereas with Thebes we could set a path/pattern and then change the transform before drawing (perhaps, say, to apply a clip in a different space) and the position of the path/pattern would be unaffected, with Moz2D such a transform change would change (and thus break) the rendering. This, incidentally, was why the SVG code was expected to be the hardest area to switch to Moz2D. Partly for historic reasons, and partly because some of the features that SVG supports lead it to, the SVG code did a lot of setting state, changing transforms, setting some more state and then drawing. Often the complexity of the code made it difficult to figure out which code could be setting relevant state before a transform change, requiring more involved refactoring. On the plus side, sorting this out has made parts of the code significantly easier to understand, and has been something I've wanted to find the time to do for years.
To continue reading about the performance benefits of the conversion of the SVG code and some possible next steps continue to part 2.
Tags: Mozilla, Moz2D, SVG