[tor-talk] hardware acceleration OK or not?

[Joe Btfsplk]

On 6/28/2014 4:54 AM, Roger Dingledine wrote:
> 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.
>
Thanks.  Has it been determined whether hardware acceleration being 
enabled can be detected for fingerprinting purposes?
I've had no TB crashes in Windows, but I'm also not sure there's any 
performance increase for typical internet usage in TB, whether hardware 
acceleration is / is not enabled.
>
> 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.
>
Yes - missed that in my haste.