Tag Archives: flash

Jethro does Mac: GPU Woes

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With a change in job, I recently shifted from my primary work computer being a Lenovo X1 Carbon running GNU/Linux to using an Apple Macbook Pro Retina 15″ running MacOS.

It’s not the first time that I’ve used MacOS as my primary workstation, but I’ve spent the vast majority of my IT life working in a purely GNU/Linux environment so it was interesting having to try and setup my usual working habits and flow with this new platform.

I’m going to do a few blog posts addressing my thoughts and issues with this platform and how I’ve found it compared to my GNU/Linux laptops. I’m going to look at both hardware and software and note down a few fixes and tricks that I’ve learnt along the way.

 

Part 2: Dual GPU Headaches

Whilst the Macbook line generally features Intel GPUs only, the flagship Macbook Pro 15″ model like mine features dual GPUs – the low power Intel GPU, as well as a high(er) performance Nvidia GPU for when graphical performance is required for certain business applications (*cough* Minecraft *cough*).

MacOS dynamically switches between the different GPUs as it deems necessary, which is a smart idea – except that MacOS seems to get led astray by malware such as Flash Player which launches in the background of some webpage somewhere and proceeds to force the GPU to run on Nvidia only, chewing up battery yet not even rendering anything.

To be fair to Apple, this is a fault with the crapiness of Flash Player and not MacOS. It certainly gives ammunition to Apple’s decision to ditch having Flash Player pre-installed on MacOS systems in 2010 to conserve battery life, the Nvidia GPU certainly shortens my laptop’s battery life by about 30mins when just sitting idle.

Annoyingly the only way I found out that my Mac wasn’t using the Intel GPU most of the time, was by installing a third party tool gfxCardStatus which shows the apps blocking low-power GPU selection and also allows forcing a particular GPU manually.

Not content with hogging CPU, Flash Player found itself wanting to hog GPU as well.

Not content with hogging CPU, Flash Player found itself wanting to hog GPU as well.

The other issue with the dual GPU design, is that it makes running GNU/Linux on these models of Macbook complex – it can be done, but you have to use MacOS to select one GPU or another before then booting into GNU/Linux and sticking with that selected GPU.

This may get better overtime, but it’s worth anyone who’s considering ditching MacOS to keep in mind.

 

See other posts in this series via the jethro does mac tag as I explore using MacOS after years of GNU/Linux only.

Die Flash, Die!

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“I hated flash whilst it was still cool!” — Jethro Carr, Internet Hipster

Adobe Flash has to be one of the more polarizing internet technologies out there, people either love it or hate it, but either way, it’s difficult to avoid. It’s used as the default for playing youtube videos, many online browser games, banner adds, “smart” uploaders and a large number of adult websites.

It’s also used for some important systems as well – Air New Zealand make heavy use of it for their Airports membership page (infact it’s not possible to login unless you have flash), which is extremely poor from a large company that should know better, along with a few too many enterprise web applications I’ve come across.

Whilst Flash has had a reputation for poor performance, CPU eating and battery-life killing, these are all implementation faults – the primary issue with Flash has always been that it’s a proprietary application and a proprietary standard.

If Adobe had simply allows Flash to become an open standard and open sourced the flash player, many of the technical issues with it would be resolved by the developer community, and it would become more ubiquitous with ports to other platforms that Adobe might consider “too small” to worth spending developer time with.

Adobe didn’t even release specifications and allow free licensing until 2009 when they kicked off the Open Screen Project and released the specification – but it’s a big catchup game to play for other applications to fully implement the specification needed to support flash applications. And the flash player itself is still fully proprietary, if Adobe doesn’t want to support a platform or a browser, you’re effectively screwed.

Open source projects like Gnash are slowly catching up, when I tried it recently it was good enough to allow me to play Youtube videos and some other flash features, but would fail on more complex applications such as Air New Zealand’s abomination of a website, so depending on your needs, you may still be chained to it.

 

Flash on Linux has always had a particularly rocky history – historically Adobe made a plugin available but only supported the i386 platform, requiring many years of the use of 32 to 64bit wrapper libraries in order to run Flash on modern 64bit Linux systems, leading to all sorts of wonderful performance, memory and audio issues.

A 64-bit alpha plugin emerged relatively recently and Adobe now supports 64-bit Linux as part of their official downloads, but other platforms such as PPC, MIPS and ARM are still unsupported – an issue which becomes more and more apparent as vendors release ARM based smart-phones and tablets and are unable to install flash player on them.

Adobe has now announced that they will be dropping support for Flash on Linux for anything but Google’s Chrome browser, which has it’s own special build in flash binaries – I suspect this will mean that it won’t extend to supporting the open source build of Chrome (called Chromium) which currently excludes the Flash support.

Of course, for other browser users like myself (eg Firefox), this decision is short sighted and very frustrating – a text book example of the problems with relying on proprietary software and standards.

Thankfully Adobe did at least realise that this decision is going to result in a lot of users sticking with the final 11.2 version on Linux and is promising to support 11.2 with security updates for another 5 years, so at least we won’t have thousands of users running around with vulnerable flash players – Flash Player does have a reputation for security holes after all.

 

On the positive side, Flash is dying.

Adobe has already announced plans to stop supporting mobile platforms like Android in favor of Adobe Air, although Adobe Air sounds like they’re making the mistakes of Flash all over again, unless they allow fully HTML5 based Air applications to run without need for a browser plugin in future.

Apple has always refused to support Flash on the iOS platform (iphone/ipad) and recently stopped shipping Flash with MacOS on Macbook Air by default. (in a hilariously ironic statement, Apple criticized Flash for being a proprietary locked down platform, whilst happily ruling the iOS platform and App store with an iron fist).

HTML5 along with Javascript is quickly securing it’s place as the web platform of choice for rich UI web application developers and I expect we’ll see more and more tools and frameworks to make working with these technologies easier.

You can even watch Youtube videos in HTML5 if you have a capable browser (recent versions of Chrome or Firefox will work) under their HTML5 trial.

Hopefully projects like Gnash are able to complete their implementation of Flash to a sufficient level to support legacy websites and applications, although by the time this happens, it may be that we won’t need it any more.

 

If Adobe had just open sourced Flash Player and the standards years ago, maybe this wouldn’t have been the case and we’d all be running stable open Flash implementations already, Adobe only has itself to blame for Flash’s demise.

But they won’t see any tears from me.