Brave-browser: VAAPI errrors at startup

[fmarier]

4039 introduced the following console error at startup on Ubuntu 18.04:

[5630:5630:1001/113429.604319:ERROR:vaapi_wrapper.cc(420)] The system version 1.1 should be greater than or equal to 1.3

Reverting the PR makes the error go away.

[fmarier]

I don't know whether it's the cause of the crashes I've seen on one of my Linux desktops, but #1024 has link to some scary reports. However it's apparently not a problem unless you run Brave with --ignore-gpu-blacklist too.

This is live in Beta and Dev and about to get into release 0.69 so it might be worth to keep in mind and/or investigate further if we see an uptick in crashes with that release.

[bsclifton]

cc: @akarshanbiswas @maximbaz @cg505

Console log being shown - possibly causing a crash, not enough info. We may need to revert https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/pull/4039 if the crashes are related

[akarshanbiswas]

@fmarier What's your system libva version?

This is not a crash. It's a warning that libva has failed to initialize because libva version installed on the system is not compatible with the chromium(brave).

Edit: Here is the code which produces this error.

[fmarier]

This is the version on my machine:

$ dpkg -l libva2  | grep libva2
ii  libva2:amd64   2.1.0-3      amd64        Video Acceleration (VA) API for Linux -- runtime

So this warning presumably means that VAAPI is not being used?

[akarshanbiswas]

@fmarier Yes. Even if you turn on the --ignore-gpu-blacklist flag, it will use software decoding.

Edit: This can be fixed by building brave with system libva version (2.1 in your case). Although I explicitly mentioned in #4039 that it needs atleast version 2.4 since libva is now ABI compatible.

[fmarier]

Ok it's probably unrelated to the frequent crashes we are seeing on Linux then. Thanks for your pointers and explanations.

[akarshanbiswas]

@bsclifton Should we close this? Since this issue is not related to vaapi but simply a warning that vaapi is not being initialised?

[bsclifton]

@akarshanbiswas yup! that is fair 😄 Thanks for helping debug! ❤️