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 Discourse.
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.
Performed real time profiling on gnome-shell but that only confirmed it was spending most of the time in OpenGL.
Analysed the GLSL source code mutter is sending to the GPU. No problems found there so far…
Analysed the window rendering code and found culling was broken; even hidden background windows get drawn so could exceed the hardware fill rate capability. Because 4K 60Hz requires 2 GB/s per maximized window, there’s not much overdraw a low-end GPU can afford.
Note these performance issues are not specific to 4K - they affect all machines. Just that for my development desktop this is the resolution where GPU limits start to become visible.
Finished (ish) the work on proposed-migration. I mailed ubuntu-devel announcing the testing instance, and someone asked for a way to compare the output. That exists now (but admittedly the page isn’t that readable to non-release-team people).
I’ll give this a week or so and then look to swap the production instance over.
Had more discussions with upstream. I’ll be starting to submit merge requests very soon.
Contacted some of the release team about Eoan’s upcoming EOL (that was fast…) and we started sharing out tasks.
Started working on updating ubuntu-cdimage (the project which controls building Ubuntu ISOs) for focal, from xenial. This is ongoing.
Responded to review feedback on snapd PR #8860 (detect conflicts when multiple snaps want to activate on the same D-Bus name). The branch now correctly detects conflicts when two conflicting snaps are installed as part of a single transaction. The preinstall conflict check remains as a way to error out early for conflicts against installed snaps.
Responded to review feedback on snapd PR #8861 (D-Bus config to support service files in /var/lib/snapd). It’s now updated with some testing improvements, and handle cases where snapd is upgraded via re-execing into a new version from the core or snapd snaps.
Updated snapd PR #8748 (do not allow installing user daemons on Ubuntu 14.04) as requested in review.
Snapcraft Github Actions:
Github somewhat recently published a new ubuntu-20.04 runner image, It turned out the snapcore/action-build action failed when run on this image, as it included an installed but unconfigured LXD snap.
I’ve published a new version of the action that resolves the incompatibility, and extended the action’s own CI to test on all runner images. This should avoid any problems when the ubuntu-latest alias is updated.
Snapcraft/CUPS Snap: Got first answers to the request for auto-connection of the interfaces, the “system-files” based interfaces will be made part of the new "cups-control"interface, according to @jdstrand, also made some adaptations for the interface auto-connection, especially added a new “system-files”-based interface named “etc-cups” for a future migration script (migration from classic CUPS to snapped CUPS). Also made available the utilities driverless, made the cupsfilter debugging tool and lpoptions working and updated README.md to reflect all the recent changes.
cups-filters: Working on moving all (deprecated) PPD file support functions of CUPS’ libcups library into a new libppd library for legacy printer driver conversion into Printer Applications.
Google Summer of Code 2020: Mentoring work going on.
firefox
chromium
snaps
other
Gnome Shell and friends:
Bug tracking: