On Mon, May 12, 2014 at 10:15 PM, Joshua Cranmer 🐧 <pidgeo...@gmail.com>wrote:
> 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). FYI people brought up the same arguments on the WebKit bug [1] and Filip did a great job explaining why this attribute is needed. 1: https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=132588 _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
