PSA: Linux Aura has been enabled on tip of tree

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Elliot Glaysher (Chromium)

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Nov 9, 2013, 7:22:37 PM11/9/13
to Chromium-dev
What is Aura:

Aura is the UI stack that we currently ship in Chrome OS and are hoping to ship to Windows users in the M32 timeframe. It does not use native widgets and is GPU accelerated when available. The only native element is the toplevel window; everything inside is drawn by chrome, instead of by GTK+ or Win32. This lets us unify our interface code; the Linux UI should now stay up to date with the Windows version.

How this affects You:

We hope to ship Linux Aura in the M33 timeframe. We have just switch to aura as the default Linux configuration, so if you sync and build on linux, you should have Aura on by default. Now that it is on, we intend to ship next week's dev channel with the new Aura interface code.

If you're a user, please file bugs. The correct tags are "OS=Linux Proj-DesktopAura". You can find a list of open bugs with those tags here.

If you develop chromiuim, please test your features on a tip-of-tree linux build or the next dev channel. I'm happy to do first round code reviews on anything that touches the new code paths.

FAQ:

Q: Why are we doing this?
A: We want to use the same interface stack across Windows, Linux and Chrome OS. Before Aura, all three ports used different interface code. Windows had HWND specific controls, the entire interface on Linux was drawn by GTK+, and Chrome OS did its own thing. This should make developing features for chrome much easier. On Linux, this also has the benefit of providing us with a path off of GTK+ v2, which has been unmaintained for years now.

Q: Does this mean we no longer link with GTK+?
A: No; we still link with GTK+, and use it for native file dialogs, IME support, and other system integration. GTK+ usage sits in a containment library and can't be used outside of chrome/browser/ui/libgtk2ui/. GTK+ doesn't do any drawing; we talk directly to the X11 server now and manage our own windows.

Q: Many Linux users won't have decent drivers installed...
A: Our compositing experts have a software fallback, in case there is no usable GPU.

dongseo...@intel.com

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Nov 11, 2013, 6:28:04 AM11/11/13
to chromi...@chromium.org
+1. Many guys are eagerly waiting for it :)

John Abd-El-Malek

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Nov 12, 2013, 6:43:17 PM11/12/13
to Elliot Glaysher, Chromium-dev
This is great, I couldn't be happier that we have the same UI code on Windows, Linux, and ChromeOS.

Given that no one maintains the GTK port and this has been the case for most of this year, it seems there's no going back to GTK. Does anyone have objections and can commit to fixing bugs in it? If not, after discussing it with Elliot we figure there's no going back at this point, so we will burn the ships by removing the linux_aura bots.

Please speak up if you disagree.

Thanks


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Steve VanDeBogart

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Nov 12, 2013, 6:50:07 PM11/12/13
to John Abd-El-Malek, Elliot Glaysher, Chromium-dev
I played with Linux Aura for just a few minutes and there are quite a few issues to be resolved (I did file some bugs).  Despite GTK being unmaintained, it is still a better user experience. For example, last I checked, printing on Linux Aura doesn't work.  I'm not saying it's not possible to make Linux Aura at least as good a user experience before the next branch point, but my appraisal would be that it's not time to burn the bridges yet.

Matt Giuca

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Nov 12, 2013, 7:03:54 PM11/12/13
to van...@chromium.org, John Abd-El-Malek, Elliot Glaysher, Chromium-dev
I tend to agree. Elliot has made a huge amount of progress on this in the past few months (I've been building Linux Aura for awhile), but I'm still not too confident that it's ready. I'm wondering if the Linux Aura in M33 is "we are going ahead with this come hell or high water" or a "we're putting this in TOT to get people to test it, but we plan to back out unless it is quite ready" type of deal?

If it's the latter, then we should not burn bridges just yet. I've been fixing GTK bugs in M31 and M32 and I think it's still worthwhile doing critical fixes on GTK in case Linux Aura doesn't ship in M33.

Lei Zhang

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Nov 12, 2013, 7:43:55 PM11/12/13
to John Abd-El-Malek, Steve VanDeBogart, Elliot Glaysher, Chromium-dev, mgi...@chromium.org
We all need to pitch in to help make Linux Aura make M33, but just in
case it is not ready in 4-6 weeks, it would be nice to have a place to
go back to. So let's not burn any bridges just yet.

Fredrik Hubinette

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Nov 12, 2013, 7:51:36 PM11/12/13
to thestig, John Abd-El-Malek, Steve VanDeBogart, Elliot Glaysher, Chromium-dev, mgi...@chromium.org
Can we have both aura and non-aura build bots as part of the submit queue until linux-gtk is officially dead?

    /Hubbe



To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to chromium-dev...@chromium.org.

Lei Zhang

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Nov 12, 2013, 7:56:41 PM11/12/13
to Elliot Glaysher (Chromium), John Abd-El-Malek, Steve VanDeBogart, Chromium-dev, mgi...@chromium.org, Fredrik Hubinette
What's the current status on the main waterfall and the Linux trybots?
Are all bots Aura-enabled or is there a mix of Aura and non-Aura bots?

Dirk Pranke

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Nov 12, 2013, 8:00:45 PM11/12/13
to Lei Zhang, Elliot Glaysher (Chromium), John Abd-El-Malek, Steve VanDeBogart, Chromium-dev, Matt Giuca, Fredrik Hubinette

This probably isn't your definition of "main waterfall", but the Blink bots are not currently Aura-enabled.

-- Dirk

Elliot Glaysher (Chromium)

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Nov 12, 2013, 8:12:49 PM11/12/13
to Lei Zhang, John Abd-El-Malek, Steve VanDeBogart, Chromium-dev, mgi...@chromium.org, Fredrik Hubinette
The main configuration is use_aura=1. There currently is a set of linux_aura builders that duplicate this that should go away. They could probably be repurposed as gtk builders.

Ben Goodger (Google)

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Nov 12, 2013, 9:56:00 PM11/12/13
to Lei Zhang, John Abd-El-Malek, Steve VanDeBogart, Elliot Glaysher, Chromium-dev, Matt Giuca
On Tue, Nov 12, 2013 at 4:43 PM, Lei Zhang <the...@chromium.org> wrote:
We all need to pitch in to help make Linux Aura make M33

Indeed. If you know Linux UI stuff even just a little, your platform needs you! Please make some time to help ship this.

This is a huge win for the entire Chrome team, enabling us to target one fewer platform and remove a lot of code. It will make delivering new features much easier on desktop.

-Ben

John Abd-El-Malek

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Nov 12, 2013, 9:59:54 PM11/12/13
to Elliot Glaysher (Chromium), Lei Zhang, Steve VanDeBogart, Chromium-dev, Matt Giuca, Fredrik Hubinette
Since Elliot's original email, we don't have Linux GTK bots on the main waterfall. So if we want to have a chance of reverting to GTK, then we will need bots to keep testing that. However then the few developers who support the Linux build will have two configs instead of one, lowering the chance of success for Linux Aura for M33.

To be clearer, what I meant by burning the ships is to remove the linux_aura bots. That means that if we were to switch main bots to GTK, we wouldn't have linux_aura bots to fall back on. As Elliot mentioned, those currently are just redundant.

Ben Wells

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Nov 13, 2013, 2:47:55 AM11/13/13
to j...@chromium.org, Elliot Glaysher (Chromium), Lei Zhang, Steve VanDeBogart, Chromium-dev, Matt Giuca, Fredrik Hubinette
Maybe switching linux_aura builders to linux_gtk builders would keep the focus on aura, where it should be, but leave a small safety net of having gtk build.

Paweł Hajdan, Jr.

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Nov 13, 2013, 2:31:58 PM11/13/13
to John Abd-El-Malek, Ben Wells, Elliot Glaysher (Chromium), Lei Zhang, Steve VanDeBogart, Chromium-dev, Matt Giuca, Fredrik Hubinette
Congratulations for the Aura launch to the dev channel!

To keep the discussion focused (as opposed to "anecdotal" arguments and burning bridges or not), I'd like to suggest using the "we launch features when they're ready" principle, and try to complete a list of blocking issues for stable channel launch.

Clearly shipping with no ability to print isn't an option. Then there might be serious regressions in the UI - again just shipping when we're ready. On the other hand I'm pretty sure we'll also get plenty of minor issues just like with any change. I don't think these should be blocking.

Paweł

Ami Fischman

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Nov 13, 2013, 2:39:57 PM11/13/13
to e...@chromium.org, Chromium-dev
On Sat, Nov 9, 2013 at 4:22 PM, Elliot Glaysher (Chromium) <e...@chromium.org> wrote:
Q: Many Linux users won't have decent drivers installed...

Related PSA: Linux Aura requires EWMH support, present in the default window managers in gnome/kde, but lacking in many other "fringe" window managers (some compliance info).  

-a

Ron Waldon

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Nov 14, 2013, 11:10:16 PM11/14/13
to chromi...@chromium.org
I'm not sure if this is already an internal goal, but I'm curious to see if others are interested in running a Chrome OS environment over their Linux distribution of choice. This would effectively be using Aura as a window manager, not merely glue between Chromium and a third-party window manager.

Ben Goodger (Google)

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Nov 14, 2013, 11:58:28 PM11/14/13
to jokey...@gmail.com, Chromium-dev
Nit:

Aura is a window library, not the window manager. The ChromeOS window manager is called Ash. (You can think of the split as analogous to X11 core vs. X window managers).

-Ben


On Thu, Nov 14, 2013 at 8:10 PM, Ron Waldon <jokey...@gmail.com> wrote:
I'm not sure if this is already an internal goal, but I'm curious to see if others are interested in running a Chrome OS environment over their Linux distribution of choice. This would effectively be using Aura as a window manager, not merely glue between Chromium and a third-party window manager.

--

Mike Frysinger

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Nov 15, 2013, 11:29:14 AM11/15/13
to jokey...@gmail.com, chromium-dev
this project aims to do that:
-mike


On Thu, Nov 14, 2013 at 11:10 PM, Ron Waldon <jokey...@gmail.com> wrote:
I'm not sure if this is already an internal goal, but I'm curious to see if others are interested in running a Chrome OS environment over their Linux distribution of choice. This would effectively be using Aura as a window manager, not merely glue between Chromium and a third-party window manager.

--

Elliot Glaysher (Chromium)

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Nov 15, 2013, 1:28:21 PM11/15/13
to chromium-dev, Chase Phillips
In case you haven't seen Chase's email, this has been rolled out temporarily due to browser_tests taking between 2x and 3x as long to complete on the buildbot vms.

You can still build this configuration by setting use_aura=1 .
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