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perf(deploy): make Electron's GPU flags tunable without a rebuild

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The kiosk has launched with --disable-gpu AND
--disable-software-rasterizer since the first ISO commit (19d43c2).
Together those turn off GPU compositing and the SwiftShader fallback,
which leaves Chromium rasterizing every pixel on the CPU. On a Bay Trail
Atom that is expensive, and it is very likely the largest single
contributor to a sluggish UI.

Nothing in git ever justified the pair. There is no comment, no issue and
no commit message about it; the flags arrived with the original hardware
bring-up and were carried through every refactor since. The descriptive
config at /etc/bitspire/config.env has even claimed
ELECTRON_DISABLE_GPU=false this whole time, contradicting the actual
command line. So this looks like bring-up scaffolding rather than a
diagnosed workaround, and it is worth re-testing now that the Mesa work
gives known-good crocus and iris drivers for all three GPU generations in
the fleet.

Testing it by rebuilding is the wrong loop. These are remote machines
with no one at the screen, a wrong flag is a black display, and each
attempt is a large closure copy over WireGuard. So the GPU flags move out
of ExecStart into a shell variable read from /var/lib/bitspire/.env: set
BITSPIRE_ELECTRON_GPU_FLAGS, restart the unit, look at the panel. A bad
value is one edit and a restart away from being undone.

Behaviour is unchanged by default. The variable uses ${VAR-default}, not
${VAR:-default}, so an absent line means today's flags while an
explicitly empty value means no GPU flags at all, i.e. full acceleration.
That distinction is the whole point and is why the .env template ships
the line commented out rather than set: a present-but-empty value would
silently enable the GPU on every machine that regenerates its .env.

The live ISO takes the same launcher via specialArgs, so the ISO and the
installed image cannot drift apart on this.

Closure is unchanged at 4604MB.
This commit is contained in:
Padreug 2026-09-24 19:13:06 +02:00
commit 425f00a71d
2 changed files with 44 additions and 3 deletions
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4
deploy/nixos/live.nix
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@ -10,7 +10,7 @@
# Does NOT import hardware/upboard.nix (its fileSystems conflict with live boot).
# Instead, duplicates only the hardware-relevant kernel modules and GPU config.
{ config, lib, pkgs, pkgs-unstable, nixpkgs, machineModel ? "douro", atm-app, ... }:
{ config, lib, pkgs, pkgs-unstable, nixpkgs, machineModel ? "douro", atm-app, kioskLauncher, ... }:
let
# Fiat code per machine model (for envTemplate display only)
@ -162,7 +162,7 @@ in
Environment = "LD_LIBRARY_PATH=${pkgs.stdenv.cc.cc.lib}/lib";
# Electron needs --no-sandbox in the live/testing environment
# --enable-logging makes renderer console.log visible in journalctl
ExecStart = lib.mkForce "${pkgs-unstable.electron}/bin/electron --no-sandbox --disable-gpu-sandbox --disable-gpu --disable-software-rasterizer --enable-logging ${atm-app}";
ExecStart = lib.mkForce "${kioskLauncher}";
# Prevent Electron from consuming all RAM on memory-constrained ATMs
MemoryMax = lib.mkForce "1G";
# Disable all security hardening that conflicts with Electron