Apparent race condition in initialization of GL stack

[joneschrisg]

CC @mwu, @jlebar, @shianyow

@mwu and @jlebar have noticed a problem in the gonk widget backend in which gecko can't draw to the screen after startup, leaving a black screen. I've noticed a problem with the android widget backend in which gecko sometimes fails to create a GL layer manager, and has to fall back on CPU compositing (which destroys performance of the home screen).

They sound like they might both be caused by the same underlying problem: failure to create a GL context around the time of startup, possibly due to a race condition. I don't know what might cause this. It'd be interesting to look at the android GL implementation and see what it does. It might have a solution to this problem already.

[michaelwu]

I worked around this problem by disabling the addons manager. Apparently the addons manager does something which causes a black screen, but only if the addons code hasn't been startup cached.

[joneschrisg]

Um ... wow. So maybe this affects firefox/android too?

[jlebar]

The fix has worked perfectly for me so far, fwiw.

[michaelwu]

Fennec on android with the xul frontend.. maybe. Not sure what's going on really.

[michaelwu]

I fixed some window visibility/invalidation/drawing issues in gonk. Now I don't have any issues with black screens. Can someone confirm? The addons manager must've triggered some sort of race that the code couldn't handle before.

[jlebar]

I'll let you know how it goes next time I rebuild and push, but it'll
be in a day or two.

On Tue, Nov 15, 2011 at 1:59 PM, Michael Wu
reply@reply.github.com
wrote:

I fixed some window visibility/invalidation/drawing issues in gonk. Now I don't have any issues with black screens. Can someone confirm? The addons manager must've triggered some sort of race that the code couldn't handle before.

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[joneschrisg]

Since this only affects the b2g-android backend, it's low priority atm.