Desktop Team Update - Monday 22nd July 2019

[vanvugt]

Gnome Shell performance (stutter | latency | CPU):

• Geometric (OpenGL-less) picking:
  • More detailed discussion with upstream.
  • Found that it eliminates constant performance warnings emitted by Mesa about gnome-shell.
  • Started converting to support picking under arbitrary 3D transformations. I’ve been resisting this for a whole year since it will take more time, will slow things down, and 3D transformations aren’t even used by anyone. But upstream are suddenly asking for 3D this week, so with the new knowledge that the branch is also a fix for all of Mesa’s performance warnings, it seems like a concession worth making now. Work in progress again…
• Honour CLUTTER_ACTOR_NO_LAYOUT more efficiently: Much more discussion and changes to resolve discussions.

Other:

• Lots of testing of flickerfree boot on various devices.

Release bugs:

• [nvidia] Corrupted wallpaper after resuming from suspend or hibernation: This week reinstalled Nvidia, retested, simplified the fix and now it has landed upstream in mutter 3.33.4.
• PulseAudio SRU for bionic is strangely regressed, but in a way that seems logically impossible. It looks like errors.ubuntu.com is grouping crashes incorrectly, reporting that if (A) then foo(A) is crashing in foo(NULL). This makes the SRU in proposed look faulty when it’s probably not
  • pulseaudio crashed with SIGABRT in pa_sink_input_assert_ref() from pa_sink_input_finish_move() from pa_sink_move_all_finish() from card_set_profile() from pa_card_set_profile
  • pulseaudio assert failure: pulseaudio: mixer.c:929: snd_mixer_elem_get_callback_private: Assertion `mixer’ failed.
• gnome-shell high memory and CPU usage when desktop files are constantly created or deleted: The latest fix is still awaiting review.

Backlogs progress

• A number of backlogs shrunk a little this week as cosmic reached end-of-life.