PoC - Chromium with openGL support for webrecorder/shepherd stack

Ubuntu 18.04 was used for this demonstration.

Requirements

1. Ubuntu with X11 server
2. nvidia GPU
3. docker
4. nvidia runtime for docker engine
5. nvidia driver > 390 (tested with nvidia-396)

How to use it

1. Allow incoming connections to your X11 server (Run xhost + on your host OS)
2. Build the new oldwebtoday/sphepherd and oldwebtoday/chromium:65 images by running docker-compose build from the terminal
3. Restart your shepherd's stack

The modified version of oldwebtoday/sphepherd starts the browsers with:

• nvidia runtime (equivalent to docker run --runtime=nvidia)
• a bind of /tmp/X11-unix:X0 between the host and browsers.

How it works

• X11 socket is shared between host and the docker containers.
• vglrun from VirtualGl wrap the chromium-browser process. it redirects GPU calls inside the container to the host through the previous socket
• The flag --disable-gpu-sandbox is passed to Chromium. The normal behaviour of Chromium use some forks, and is bypassing vglrun. This flag avoid this.

How to check if openGL is working

open your browser to the following URL chrome://:gpu

References

• nvidia runtime for docker engine
• glvnd-runtime
• TurboVNC
• VirtualGl