Questions about the component mode

[dv]

Hello all,

I have been wondering about the component build in Chromium. Its only
downside seems to be that there are a bunch of DLLs/shared objects lying
around. Are there other drawbacks? I was thinking of modifying the OE
recipes for Chromium to build it in component mode by default. The build
consumes much less RAM, and replacing individual components afterwards
is much easier. Sounds really useful to me, not just for development.
So, would there be any drawbacks when I enable component build by default?

cheers

[Ryan Sleevi]

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Its not designed, supported, or intended for that, so it'd be akin to trying to port to AIX?

[dv]

How is this like trying to port to AIX? I don't understand that analogy.
Component mode is a well-known feature in Chromium. Do you mean that component mode is *only* supposed to be used for development, and for nothing else, ever?

[Ryan Sleevi]

For now, correct.

[Torne (Richard Coles)]

On 1 September 2014 20:31, dv <dv7...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hello all,

I have been wondering about the component build in Chromium. Its only downside seems to be that there are a bunch of DLLs/shared objects lying around. Are there other drawbacks?

It uses (slightly) more RAM and is somewhat slower (and probably starts up slower as well). If you're seeing it use less RAM you are probably not looking at the right memory usage statistics. Compiling everything into a single binary is more efficient, so component builds are only used for development.

 

I was thinking of modifying the OE recipes for Chromium to build it in component mode by default. The build consumes much less RAM, and replacing individual components afterwards is much easier.

It's not really possible to replace individual components in production; it works in development because the code changes you have made are typically isolated, but it's not generally possible to build some components from one version of the code and some components from another and have them work together: the component system is not actually designed to have a stable API or ABI between components and it's expected that they are all compiled together from the same codebase.

 

Sounds really useful to me, not just for development. So, would there be any drawbacks when I enable component build by default?

cheers