Hi
We have a few in-house tools that need WebGL; they used to work in centos-7. Recently, we have been migrated to rocky-9 and our pre-existing tools no longer work; IT indicates that such extension is insecure and, therefore, turned off.
Questions: is there a (secure) alternative to WebGL? What to use instead?
The correct way forward would be to update the tools that are old to work with a new operating system. Some things were possible under EL8 for example crypto policy in legacy which I believe is no longer possible in Rocky 9. Maybe you could try running on Rocky 8 instead of Rocky 9 and see if it’s any better. Rocky 8 is supported until 2029. Rocky 9 until 2032.
Unfortunately CentOS 7 is not the same as EL8 or EL9 so expect old things not to work. A similar comparison is when they stopped making web browsers to run on Windows XP. At that point you are stuck with running the old version until you upgrade your application, or in this case your tools that require an old WebGL or whatever.
Thanks for your comments, though they are very generic and could be said about any piece of software; besides, nobody said anything about “old WebGL”…I would be just about 100% sure that IT is talking about the current WebGL, or whichever version comes with rocky-9.
Can you therefore please clarify with a lot more detail on the problem then? You mention using tools that ran on CentOS 7. Just because something runs on CentOS 7, doesn’t mean it will run on EL8 or EL9. Rocky 8 and 9 is much newer than CentOS 7 so that means whatever you are using up until now is old since it was designed to run on CentOS 7 or earlier versions of software. At least that is what it looks like from what you wrote.
You also mention about WebGL, and whatever your IT team said, but the lack of detail doesn’t help for anyone to actually assist. You say something is turned off, but you don’t say what. You don’t mention what your tools rely on package wise under CentOS for anyone to suggest potential alternatives on EL8/EL9.
Also if your tools on CentOS 7 rely on dependencies on CenOS 7, then there are chances they will not work on EL8 or EL9 due to the fact the packages are newer.
WebGL is implemented in most browsers.
There’s a test page here:
http://get.webgl.org/
Behind the scenes the browser uses OpenGL ES and GL shader language.
Ok, I reached out to the user who reported the problem and asked again.
Apparently the update from centos-7 to rocky-9 has nothing to do with the problem and the timing was a bit coincidental and not on the dot; meaning, the in-house tools actually worked for a few weeks after the update to rocky-9 and one day they just stopped working…the issue being simply that hardware acceleration for the browser has been disable.
If we visit browser page chrome://gpu, we get the following:
Graphics Feature Status
=======================
* Canvas: Software only, hardware acceleration unavailable
* Canvas out-of-process rasterization: Disabled
* Direct Rendering Display Compositor: Disabled
* Compositing: Software only. Hardware acceleration disabled
* Multiple Raster Threads: Enabled
* OpenGL: Disabled
* Rasterization: Software only. Hardware acceleration disabled
* Raw Draw: Disabled
* Skia Graphite: Disabled
* Video Decode: Software only. Hardware acceleration disabled
* Video Encode: Software only. Hardware acceleration disabled
* Vulkan: Disabled
* WebGL: Software only, hardware acceleration unavailable
* WebGL2: Software only, hardware acceleration unavailable
* WebGPU: Disabled
In contrast, my personal computer shows “Hardware accelerated” everywhere, with OpenGL and WebGPU both Enabled.
Hence back to the original question: is there an alternative to WebGL? Apparently not?
I guess I will have to venture into IT’s rabbit hole and see if I can ever get to human who can provide evidence that WebGL is not secure, in the hopes that it can be challenged…we shall see.
So are you saying someone has changed the settings in your web borwser? Which exact browser are you using. Only Firefox comes with Rocky. The “chrome” protocol doesn’t mean it’s a Google chrome browser.
Did you try the WebGL test page above (home vs work) to confirm it’s working / not working?
Are you asking the right question(s)?
The chrome://gpu shows that webgpu, webgl, webgl2 are NOT enabled in the user’s Chrome settings. It also needs to be enabled in the setting of other browsers to activate hardware acceleration (i.e. MS Edge, Opera, Apple Safari, Firefox, and Chrome).
Aha!
Hi, gerry, thanks for insisting.
In Rocky 9, we do have both Firefox and Chrome. Don’t know what IT did, but using Firefox is a bit annoying; Chrome works just fine.
I visited the page you provided: http://get.webgl.org/
In my personal Windows computer, I do see a spinning cube.
In the work Linux session, I do not; or…I didn’t !!
The non-working page showed a link to a support forum and the correct thread; there, they recommend to Enable the Override Software Rendering List Flag in chrome:flags
After I enable that flag, the spinning cube page started to work!!
Thank you very much for that.
Now, I am not sure if I should continue to pursue the conversation with IT or just keep quiet. Though I am not sure how I am going to spread this trick among the user community without IT hearing about it. We shall see.
Anyway, thanks again.