On 5/12/2014 7:03 PM, Rik Cabanier wrote:
*Concerns* The original proposal required that a platform must return the exact number of logical CPU cores. To mitigate the fingerprinting concern, the proposal was updated so a user agent can "lie" about this. In the case of WebKit, it will return a maximum of 8 logical cores so high value machines can't be discovered. (Note that it's already possible to do a rough estimate of the number of cores)
The discussion on the WHATWG mailing list covered a lot more than the fingerprinting concern. Namely: 1. The user may not want to let web applications hog all of the cores on a machine, and exposing this kind of metric makes it easier for (good-faith) applications to inadvertently do this. 2. It's not clear that this feature is necessary to build high-quality threading workload applications. In fact, it's possible that this technique makes it easier to build inferior applications, relying on a potentially inferior metric. (Note, for example, the disagreement on figuring out what you should use for make -j if you have N cores).
-- Joshua Cranmer Thunderbird and DXR developer Source code archæologist _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
