Monday 1st April 2019

[vanvugt]

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.

Last week’s notes are here: Monday 25th March 2019
Next week’s notes are here: Monday 8th April 2019

[vanvugt]

Gnome Shell performance (stutter | latency | CPU):

• The old Nvidia high CPU bug is back under the microscope thanks to related news reports about KDE. This week we confirmed I had already proposed a branch which fixes it by accident.
• Revised, retested, resolved discussions or fixed conflicts in various upstream proposals:
  • Consolidate all frame throttling into clutter-stage-cogl
  • clutter-stage-cogl: Reduce output latency and reduce missed frames too:
    • Also awaiting review as a Debian proposal for inclusion in Ubuntu 19.04
  • clutter: Deliver events sooner when possible
  • Geometric (GPU-less) picking and also
• Briefly experimented with adding clipping to clutter-stage picking. Got it working but unfortunately it’s one of those things where calculating what to cull takes more CPU time than not culling at all.

Gnome Shell other bugs:

• Most of the week investigating panel menu rendering problems which only seem to occur with multi-monitors plus this optimization and this optimization:
  • Fix proposed and landed upstream
• The fix for blurry wallpaper in mutter 3.32 also landed this week.
• Proposed a fix for yet another rendering glitch triggered by recent optimizations.
• Made a very quick attempt at trying to fix Will’s touchscreen bug.

Release bugs (no progress this week due to the above upstream bugs for disco):

• 144Hz/120Hz monitor but mutter seems to cap rendering at 60FPS:
  • disco: Fix released
  • cosmic: Fix released
  • bionic: Fix still under review. I think it can’t land because the previous SRU is blocked in proposed by a Budgie bug.
• Top bar and shell dialogs are not displayed properly when zoom is enabled:
  • disco: Fix released
  • cosmic: Fix released
  • bionic: Fix still in proposed, blocked for the same Budgie reasons as above.
• App grid animation causes heavy CPU spikes and dropped frames in Wayland & Xorg
  • disco: Fix released
  • cosmic: Fix released
  • bionic: Fix still in proposed, blocked presumably because mutter 3.28.3+git20190124-0ubuntu18.04.1 is seen as a prerequisite. Not sure it really is.
• [bionic][regression] gnome-shell crashes with SIGSEGV in meta_window_actor_is_destroyed(self=NULL) called from _switchWorkspaceDone() [windowManager.js:1787]
  • bionic: No time this week
• apps launched from gnome shell do not get input focus:
  • disco: No time this week

Backlogs progress:

• Good news (falling backlogs): firefox, thunderbird, nautilus, xorg, gdm3, chromium-browser, alsa-driver
• Bad news (consistently growing backlogs): ubiquity

[oSoMoN]

firefox

• prepared and uploaded 66.0.2+build1 update, published to all supported releases by the security team
• re-enabled unity-menubar.patch in beta branches

thunderbird

• 60.6.1+build2 update published by the security team

chromium

• requested a store assertion for the personal-files interface
• updated beta to 74.0.3729.28, then 74.0.3729.40
• updating dev to 75.0.3745.4

libreoffice

• built 6.2.2 snap in candidate channel and found a problem with firebird databases, fixed and promoted to stable

other

• updated ubuntu-wallpapers with the community wallpapers for disco (bug #1821900), and asked @Laney to sponsor the upload

[didrocks]

Short week (2 days off)

• Work on proposal with Jean-Baptiste to enable locking sessions for gsettings key, Shell mode, apps that can be ran, polkit, confinement and a separate admin session.
• Misc:
  • osinfo-db + libosinfo updates after coordinating with usptream (tests failing)
  • promoted vulkan-loader
  • tested, reviewed and sponsored scaling factor work from Marco (mutter (https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/mutter/3.32.0-1ubuntu1) + gnom-control-center (https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-control-center/1:3.32.0.1-1ubuntu6)). Our ubuntu git branches are up to date.
  • another Shell review: https://code.launchpad.net/~3v1n0/ubuntu/+source/gnome-shell/+git/gnome-shell/+merge/365180, only merged on our ubuntu master GNOME Shell branches (wait for more things to be released).

[3v1n0]

Shell world

• Continued mutter Randr branch cleanups and fixes, preparing for upstreaming
• Prepared packaging for disco, now landed
• Fixed magnifier when changing resolution / scaling after initialization [MR, merged]
• Split magnifier fixes MR into !454 and !475 for easier reviewing
• Cleanup for magnifier activation code checks [MR, under review, got comments]
• Some upstream reviews and merging

Misc

• SRU verifications
• Fixed gnome-appindicator version on GNOME extensions website for who was installing it from it
• Proposed a change (specified, let’s say) on extensions-web to fix the above issue at server side.

RLS Bugs

• Prepared fix for 1818790, now committed in shell, will be there in next package release (waiting for .1, if nothing triggers it earlier).
• All bb-tracking one blocked by waiting 3.28.3+git20190124-0ubuntu18.04.1 to be accepted (which got blocked by budgie issue on new mutter )

[seb128]

• One day back from holidays, mostly catching up with backlog
• reviewed/sponsored an unity-control-center segfault fix for the new glib
• looked at firewalld autopkgtest again

Those were from before holidays

• desktop updates (network-manager, nautilus)
• cherry picked a nautilus segfault fix from Andrea
• tested the x11 scaling ppa from Marco, reported/discussed some issue which Marco resolved
• Canonical HR reviews
• sponsored the livepatch indicator from Andrea
• reviewed/sponsored language-selector label alignment fixes

[robert.ancell]

• Tested older versions of gnome-software handle “blackhole” server reviews.ubuntu.com will be replaced with.
• Got GNOME Software to show snaps keyed by generated AppStream IDs (e.g. io.snapcraft.moon-buggy-2kkitQurgOkL3foImG4wDwn9CIANuHlt)
• Fixed installed tests in snapd-glib (disco)
• Verified snapd-glib 1.47 SRU updates (cosmic, bionic, xenial).
• Add common ID searching support to snapd-glib.
• Reviews gnome-control-center branches.

[jibel]

• 19.04 Beta
• session lock down
• investigated bug 1761497
• Fixed automated desktop tests and image promotion
• Cleaned up obsolete QA jobs

[laney]

I’ve only been back one day

• Catching up, including giving feedback on handling of freeze exceptions
• Couple of fixes (gnome-characters, gnome-desktop3)
• Sponsored the community wallpapers from the contest
• Fixed autopkgtest not queueing new jobs (rabbitmq got sad)

[azzar1]

• Proposed fix for “pkexec fails in a non-graphical environment” (Trello Card)
• Proposed fix for “[tracker] SIGSEGV in process_func_start” (Trello Card)
• Proposed fix for “Gedit no longer uses gvfs to store metadata in Linux” (Trello Card)
• Removing the use of some deprecated code in tracker-miners
• [desktop icons] Align the behaviour of the rename popup with the rename popup in Nautilus

[till-kamppeter]

• cups-filters: Fixed some minor bugs, test page printed three times on duplex printers (GitHub Issue #101), and Brother printers do not print PostScript level 3 (LP: #1306849, comment #42).
• GTK print dialog: Working with upstream on the integration of the patch, especially GTK source code policies and also a fix on the patch from upstream (GitLab Merge Request #434).
• Google Summer of Code 2019: Selecting students and mentors for the suggested projects. In OpenPrinting we will be able to mentor up to 6 students: Printer Applications (make printer drivers snappable), IPP System Service (GUI app replacing admin web interfaces of printers), scp-dbus-service converted to C, …
• Avahi: Working with Trent on merging the localhost support. He suggests that also CUPS need to get changed.
• Bugs.

[kenvandine]

Holiday most of the week

• snapcraft 3.3 release testing, gave it the green light
• new hyper-v image which I’ll test today