electron app.disableHardwareAcceleration()

[khassel]

Electron is throwing gpu errors under some circumstances e.g. running in a docker container as mentioned here and there were already some threads in the forum about this.

To disable these errors you can add app.disableHardwareAcceleration() in electron.js or --disable-gpu in package.json.

Both variants are ugly because for automating this you can only use sed or similar tools.

So I would like to add an environment variable ELECTRON_DISABLE_GPU and add app.disableHardwareAcceleration() in electron.js only when set.

More info's to disableHardwareAcceleration:

• https://www.electronjs.org/docs/latest/tutorial/offscreen-rendering
• https://www.electronjs.org/docs/latest/api/app#appdisablehardwareacceleration

May it is also an option to run always with app.disableHardwareAcceleration()?

[shin10]

Have you considered to use

electronSwitches: ["disable-gpu"],

in your config.js?

I feel your sed pain, since I have several hardware components attached to GPIO but am developing in WSL mostly. So I have to en/disable the components depending on the platform. To do this I'm running a make recipe which substitutes via envsubst variables sourced from an .env file before starting the app. That's ok-ish I guess. At least I can handle all my secrets that way, too.
It's work in progress but you can have a look at my conf here.

Anyway, I'm super new to MM so if this is a stupid idea, just ignore it. I'm open to suggestions as well.

[khassel]

electronSwitches: ["disable-gpu"],

yes, tested this with no success, --disable-gpu is missing in the list of supported command line switches.

I'm already using the envsubst construction in the docker entrypoint script but thats no solution for this problem.

[shin10]

Ah, I see. Well, it's been a while, but I once used software rendering for tests of pages with three.js in docker. Back then I used Chrome with OSMesa. There seems to be a similar approach for electron with SwiftShader https://medium.com/@mohamedmansour/how-to-run-electron-js-in-software-rendering-headless-49601b87961e
Maybe that's an alternative to disabling the GPU.

[khassel]

I think the approach with the env var is much simpler than adding the SwiftShader hack.