Sony WebKit Work

WebKit team in Sony Interactive Entertainment

Don Olmstead presenting

• WebGL
• Rendering

WebKit on PlayStation!

Why is it used?

• PS3, PS Vita, PS4 (Current Focus)
• Use it as a Browser on the PS4.
• But mainly in the PS UI.
• Social apps on PS4 are all web applications.
• But most importantly, the PlayStation Store.

Port Information

• POSIX-compatible platform (based on FreeBSD)
• Cairo/TextureMapper
• Inspired by GTK/EFL/WinCairo
• WebKit 2-based.
• Uses cURL for networking.
• Cross compile from Windows workstations to PS4 device.
• Build using Clang.

Goal: Move to Trunk

• Previously: Grab a Safari tagged SVN revision and port to their software.
• Bad!<br />
  • Always porting.<br />
  • Lots of manual porting of Security patches.<br />
  • Never contributing back!

Current status

• Permission from Sony was granted to start contributing!
• JavaScriptCore now being built directly from trunk.
• Working on CMake/MSBuild toolchains to integrate a port.
• Preparing a BuildBot, working on getting a JSC test runner working.

Potential Contributions

Platform Abstraction Layer

• Clear platform layer. Easier for &quot;out-of-trunk&quot; ports.
• Would lower the bar for people to use WebKit.
• Perhaps merge various *NIX ports.

Rendering Improvements

• Optimize performance: Immutable Render Trees?
• Optimize memory use
• CSS Containment - might dovetail nicely with Web Components.
• Houdini<br />
  • Would allow neat effects (highlight)<br />
  • Fun to do!

Developer Tooling

Found that developers don't have a good grasp of rendering:

• Why is a layer created?

• Example:

"Layerhood"

• Visualization of the current layers in a document.
• Real-time
• Maybe integrate to Web Inspector? -> Here a really cool demo of their 3D layer visualization tool was presented.

HDR

• TV's can output HDR information.
• PlayStation 4 support
• HDR image format support.

Q &amp; A

• Is the store and so forth run directly over network? Not file URLs, etc.?
  • Yep. They have their own certificates, but otherwise just like a Web Browser.
• Are web developers working on PS4 directly?
  • Sony exposes some special content to web engine on PS4, but generally they can work on desktop.
  • Developers generally like to work on PC for performance, ease of developement.
• JIT?
  • External developers (e.g., EA) can't use JIT.
  • Sony doesn't expose JIT to developers.
• Games?
  • It's available to developers, but they aren't aware of any currently taking advantage of it.
• WebGL?
  • Not available to external developers, but is used inside PS4 store and platform content.
• Do you want to become a &quot;real&quot; in-tree port?
  • Yes.
  • Sony knows WebKit has been burned in the past. Hope that being present for this meeting and engaging will help pave the way.
• Platform Abstraction Layer
  • Some work exists now.
  • Sony (and the WebKit team) can build on it.
• TV
  • Games can launch into browser to show relevant content.
  • No good statistics on use.
• Why did you choose WebKit?
  • Started before the Blink branch.
  • JSC having an interpreted mode was important for security reasons.
  • Chrome is the &quot;Google Show&quot;, not good opportunities to contribute due to their army of engineers banging on it.
  • WebKit's strategy is focused on performance and small footprint. This is critical for PS4 and devices.
    • Blink is more about feature-feature-feature.
• Do you use WebKitTestRunner and related tools?
  • Starting a process on PS is costly.
  • Existing process of pushing a file to device and running it doesn't work well for them.
  • Hope to work to allow one binary to go to device, then run the tests there in some set of processes.
• HTML5 Videos?
  • Yes. Uses an internal library.
• How do you implement Accelerated Graphics?
  • Sony has an OpenGL layer on top of something very similar to Vulcan.
  • An Intel guy is doing some Canvas-drawing code right on the hardware. Might use some of this in the future.