Hi everyone, below you will find the updates from the Desktop team from the last week.
If you’re interested in discussing a topic please start a thread in the Desktop area of the Community Hub (this site).
We also have our weekly meeting on IRC. We meet on Tuesday at 13:30 UTC in #ubuntu-desktop on Freenode. There will be an “Any Other Business” section at the end where you are welcome to raise topics. These topics might be discussed during the meeting, or afterwards depending on the time, depth of conversation, topic and so on.
I’m working to apply Yaru’s theme modifications to the Adwaita 3.18 SASS code.
xdg-desktop-portal:
I investigated bug 1691649, which shows that the xdg-desktop-portal service will segfault if it can’t start xdg-desktop-portal-gtk for some reason (mostly timeouts looking at the error reports).
I don’t have a good indication of the cause of the timeouts: many of the error reports appear to come from the live session so it could just be IO starvation.
Completed profiling of mozjs. The data that was suspicious last week was just broken symbol resolution. The debug packages we publish for mozjs60 don’t work well (maybe too optimized?) and to get something that does work requires manually rebuilding mozjs60+gjs.
Conclusion: The animation is now smooth and its CPU requirement has been halved (if you apply all the fixes). It spends around half of the remaining time inside mozjs but I don’t have good enough data from GJS Sysprof to make more progress right now.
Closed the grid scrolling performance fix after some upstream conflicts occurred. The conflicts were caused by a large number of design changes just landed in gnome-shell 3.30.2 (yes really) and they also happen to improve scrolling performance. So there is no longer an obvious visible problem to test against and less need for my original fix, for now.
Good news for firefox, xorg, thunderbird, chromium-browser, pulseaudio, bluez, ubuntu-themes.
Bad news for ubiquity, nautilus, apport, grub2, xorg-server, and alsa-driver (newly added - I will start attacking it in the coming weeks).
Some updates from last week’s ISO testing bugs
Keyboard backlight controls not working turned out to be a regression in cosmic, and a fix is already upstream. We will need to update upower at some point but it’s not a major priority since nobody else seems to have noticed the regression in 18.10 yet.
GDM: debugged with upstream CPU taking 100% after log in due to GNOME Shell (gdm) restarting in loop. Traced down to commit which introduced the regression (nvidia driver now forced to fallback to Xorg). Tried multiple iterations and patches with upstream + more gdb fun. Decided right now with upstream to revert the nvidia force fallback, as it intended to really fix Wayland (gdm) to Wayland (user session) case, and we have Wayland (gdm) to Xorg (user session). Bug: https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1797355, https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gdm3/3.30.1-1ubuntu2.
Some iso testing and check-language-support inspection. Multiple issues found with Laney (en_US always installed, selected instead of en_GB and so on…). Those issues are preexistant and involves ubiquity, debian installer, localechooser and account-services. Too risky for release (maybe something to take into account in potential new installer architecture)
Misc:
VM upgrade testing. Found https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ubuntu-release-upgrader/+bug/1797353, but can’t reproduce anymore and may be related to low memory issues. Wrote a patch for do-release-upgrade which is a quirk to force GNOME Shell to reload, but decided to not upload it unless really needed as it’s not perfect and a little bit hackish.
firefox 63 (latest beta) now builds successfully on all supported series in the beta PPA, thanks @ricotz for backporting NodeJS 8.11 to trusty along with all its build dependencies ; it is being released as stable this week
tested building the chromium snap against core18, this apparently works well and fixes a couple of outstanding issues (bug #1771380, bug #1791307), but unfortunately xdg-open doesn’t work with core18, so it’s not ready for prime time
Google Summer of Code 2018: Travelled to Sunnyvale to attend the Mentor Summit at Google
First Mentor Summit for me after 10 years org admin for the Linux Foundation
Met many people of many different free software projects
Got an invitation to FOSSASIA Conference in Singapore March 14-17, 2019
Got feedback about a printing tutorial which I held in Brasil (on FISL) 15 years ago
We showed off a video where our students talked about their projects, plus a success story of a 2008 student (Lars übernickel, now Karlitski) who made it to Engineering Manager at Red Hat, all in a 3-minute Lightning Talk.
Got a lot of T-Shirts G-Socks and other stuff
Started off OpenPrinting web site renovation with several students of GSoC 2017 and 2018 volunteering.