[tor-talk] hardware acceleration OK or not?

[Roger Dingledine]

On Fri, Jun 27, 2014 at 01:27:50PM -0500, Joe Btfsplk wrote:
> Hardware acceleration is unchecked by default it Torbrowser.
> 
> Other than some machines might not support it, is there a reason not
> to enabled it?
> 
> Some fingerprinting or other issue?

https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/10531
which points to
https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/2013-June/thread.html#28620

Basically, some Windows systems were crashing when Tor Browser had
hardware acceleration enabled.

I think we made that change in TBB 3.5rc1:
https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tor-browser-bundle-35rc1-released

See the (alas not labelled with a ticket number) line:
"Misc Prefs: Disable layer acceleration to avoid crashes on Windows"

It looks from the various tickets like the issue is not entirely sorted
for all users.

> The dev manual (stable) just has this to say:
> 
> */"HardwareAccel* *0*|*1*
> 
> If non-zero, try to use built-in (static) crypto hardware
> acceleration when available. (Default: 0)"/
> 
> Indicating it may be turned on or off (off by default).

Be careful! I think you asked here about hardware acceleration in Tor
Browser, aka our Firefox fork, but the man page you're quoting is for
the program called tor.

--Roger