Platform/2011-05-24

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Notices / Schedule

• mozilla-central → mozilla-aurora merge just completed
• We will turn off nightly updates off of mozilla-aurora for a couple of days (bug 659258)
• We went to the beta channel last Friday. We were throttled @ 10% until Monday, now we are unthrottled
• Building another beta build on Friday

Firefox Development

• about:permissions landed, though no UI exposure yet
• Paolo Amadini has been doing amazing work on a new download manager
• sdwilsh doing a deep investigation on bug 655930 (Chrome seems to be a 25% pageload hit on Windows) – has identified several potential culprits, still digging. Mostly platform changes, but the right people are involved.
• Two new Web Console features landed for Firefox 6: a popup for autocompletion (which is way more pleasant to use!), and the ability to reposition the console. Mihai Sucan and David Dahl got these two nice improvements together, and Mihai made a quick video showing them off.
• Dave Camp set up a page of devtools repositories for people interested in trying out the devtools works-in-progress (Highlighter, Style Inspector, Style Editor, Style Doctor, Debugger)
• There is a dev-apps-firefox discussion about enhancing the venerable View Source to lead people into more sophisticated developer tools.

GFX

• Benoit Jacob updated ANGLE today (bug 657748)
  • Please watch out for WebGL regressions!

JS

• IonMonkey progress
  • SSA MIR builder pass works on a subset of JS.
  • Work has begun on SSA MIR->LIR lowering passes.
  • Interns Andrew Drake and Ryan Pearl are here; work has started on linear scan register allocation
• GC could use some help on XPConnect (starting next week)

Layout

• Nothing to share

Plugins

• Benoit Girard working on async plugin drawing for Mac OS X, should improve security and responsiveness.
• Accelerated NPAPI drawing for Windows proposed on plugin-futures, along with an asynchronous bitmap API.

DOM

• Thank you Mounir for helping manage the cedar tree!
• Tracked some talos invariances down to differences in the builds themselves, not differences in source. See bug 653961 for details and ongoing investigation.
• Landed support for HTML5 dataset attributes!
• WebSockets landed! May still prefix the DOM API, but the protocol support should be done.

Network

• Reviewing pipelining improvements from Patrick McManus, hopefully we can consider using it on mobile for Firefox 7.

Tree Management

• Joey Armstrong <joey@mozilla.com> joins the release engineering team this week. He’ll be working on improving our Makefile situation. Here’s hoping for faster, less complicated builds.

Stability Report

• Overall, the trunk has been pretty stable – ~50K users. Crash rate yesterday was 2.8 crashes per 100 ADU. Not really this high since seeing some crashes from older builds.
• Top crash on trunk – Bug 657292 – xpc::XrayWrapper<JSCrossCompartmentWrapper>
  • Checked into trace monkey. Need to track this for Aurora to make sure it gets landed there.
• Many changes landed in the last couple of days. Not enough crash data yet to assess stability of the stuff that was just checked in.
• Doing a good job of handling top crash regressions. The crashkill team needs to spend a bit more time on analysis to detect if there are certain grouped crashes that are increasing.
• Some new features coming in new Socorro release 1.7.8. Will post a summary about that.

Roundtable

• Deb is working out a new Feature Page format that will make it a lot easier to use the wiki for release planning and tracking. This will require that all feature pages be updated once the format is finalized, so do not be alarmed when those pages start changing (Deb will do initial updates). This should take no more than a week to complete. Blog post with more information will be posted soon.
  • On this note, if your feature does not have a complete feature page 4 working days before the merge to Aurora (aka Thursday of the week before), marketing will not be able to promote your feature. Each feature page should include a complete summary, use-case, and goals of the feature (with screenshots if applicable) and should be edited as the feature moved forward. See a good example of what a feature page should look like here.
• Sheriff app bug 571886 (johnath)
• Will Friday “go to build beta” also be for Fennec?

Discussion of How to Make Tests Faster

We sat around on the phone talking about different ideas to help improve the automated build/test turnaround times. We have a set of short, medium, and long range plans.

Short term

• (joduinn/releng) Try by default will not do anything
• (joduinn/releng) Stop running always failing tests automatically.
• investigate bug 659222 – joduinn

Medium term

• (releng) Test suites in progress should be available on try and selfserve even when those test suites are not being run automatically. (This is an addition to the “stop running always failing tests” above)
• (releng) see if we can do anything to add machines before we get a new colo.

Long term

• Experiment with moving tests into virutalization (bmoss and rsayre to get team to figure this out). ctalbert volunteers to help
  • Rsayre will help with getting engineering help for long term solution/fixing tests that proove intermittent in virtualization
• Figure out a way to not run tests that always pass on every test run. (Ateam/Releng)